Technology Holds Promise for Students With Poor Vocabulary Skills

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Education Week – Steven L. Miller

In 1995, the researchers Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley published the results of their groundbreaking study that found 4-year-olds from working-class families and families on welfare had considerably smaller vocabularies than their age-mates from professional families. This difference has been called “the 30-million-word gap.”

One reason their work has been so influential is that it helped quantify the challenge education systems face when children enter school with vast differences in educational readiness. The question is: What have we learned since then? Twenty years later, why are so many learners in our schools still struggling? The simple answer is that there’s much more to it than a vocabulary deficit.

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Research from programs funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development has shown that kindergarten assessments can accurately predict greater than 90 percent of struggling 3rd grade readers. So, if we can accurately predict in kindergarten who’s at risk, what are we doing in the time between kindergarten and 3rd grade?

Language and, later, reading experience are two of the largest contributors to plasticity in the developing brain. They are also large contributors to the way we build our cognitive skills, as well as the brain’s reward systems that play a role in our communication patterns.

As illustrated in the Hart and Risley study, language for many impoverished children is used more often to communicate negation, disapproval, or punishment. In families in economic distress, the average child heard about one encouragement to every two discouragements. In contrast, the average child from a professional family heard six times the number of encouragements for using language for every one discouragement. This creates a complex relationship between differences in the quality, context, and quantity of words spoken.

Think about that for a moment. For an impoverished child, language is a way to be punished, twice as often as it is to receive positive reinforcement or praise. So, that child is struggling with much more than a 30-million-word difference. If a child has had language used twice as often to put him or her down, that child is not going to be excited about talking or using language at all. Imagine the teacher’s challenge for reaching and educating the language-impoverished student.

Encouraging talking, however, is vital to building cognitive skills. The more we talk, the longer the memory span becomes, and the better our attention and our processing skills get. If we’re not practicing these skills, they won’t be well developed when we arrive at school. In a classroom of 20-plus students, a kindergarten teacher doesn’t always have the opportunity to spend a lot of time with children who are a year or more behind when they start the school year.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog