From
Dialogue About Language, Literacy and Learning
by frantoomey in Uncategorized Tags: Achievement Gap, Oral Language, VocabularyEdit
Part 2A
We have a long history of
research that tells us that children who enter Kindergarten behind their peers
in language skills, particularly vocabulary skills, will be at a great
educational disadvantage and often will not catch up for many years, if at all.
This is still another indicator that “We can’t wait” until 3rd grade
to decide that children are behind and need to catch up.
One of the first
studies on the “achievement gap” that I read has had a great influence on my
work and teaching of courses in “Language and Learning” and “Reading
Comprehension”. In 1976 NCTE published a monograph titled Language
Development, Kindergarten through Grade Twelve by Walter Loban.
Loban reported on a study where Loban (and his team) followed a group of 211
students who differed in sex, ethnic background, socioeconomic status and
spread of intellectual abilities. Data were provided on 3 subgroups of children
described as high functioning, low functioning, and mixed (high and low
functioning) based on a range of listening, speaking, reading and writing
measures along with teacher ratings every year of the amount of language, quality
of vocabulary, skill in communication, organization, purpose and control of
language, wealth of ideas, and quality of listening. Loban’s most telling
finding was that “those superior in oral language in kindergarten and grade
one before they learned to read and write are the very ones who excel in
reading and writing by the time they are in grade six.
A second influential group of studies looked at vocabulary
specifically and the differences in achievement, even at the preschool level.
The Hart and Risley Study
(The Matthew Effect)
The Thirty Million Word
Gap
“In this ground breaking
study, Betty Hart and Todd Risley entered the homes of 42 families from various
socio-economic backgrounds to assess the ways in which daily exchanges between
a parent and child shape language and vocabulary development. Their findings
were unprecedented, with extraordinary disparities between the sheer number of
words spoken as well as the types of messages conveyed. After four years these
differences in parent-child interactions produced significant discrepancies in
not only children’s knowledge, but also their skills and experiences with
children from high-income families being exposed to 30 million more words than
children from families on welfare. Follow-up studies showed that these
differences in language and interaction experiences have lasting effects on a
child’s performance later in life.”
See other resources from the Rice center for education: the OWL
Lab in Action (Videos) (Oral and Written Language Laboratory for preK students)
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