ECDA 2014: Closing the Word Gap

Closing the Word Gap
Strategies for Speaking with Young Children
Dr. Trisha Craig
Wheelock College – Singapore
September 20, 2014
inspire a world of good WHEELOCK
COLLEGE - SINGAPORE

How many words will you hear in the
next 10 minutes?
Somewhere between 1500 and 2000
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SINGAPORE

What is the Word Gap?
• Ground-breaking work of Hart and Risley
• Children from different socio-economic
levels acquired language at different rates
• Professional level parents spoke more often
and with a greater variety of words from
earlier ages. And the kind of talk varied.
Pineapple
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• They studied families and 7-9 month old
babies until 3 years old, observing and
recording communication for 2 ½ years
• Families were upper, middle and lower SES
• By age 3 noticeable differences:
Upper Middle Lower
Parents 382 251 167
Children 297 216 149
Average # of different words per hour
Rhino
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• By age 3, the difference in the number of
words the high SES child has heard compared
to a low SES child:
30,000,000
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• Moats (1999) estimated that advantaged
children entered primary school with a
vocabulary of about 20,000 words compared
with linguistically disadvantaged children who
knew 5,000 words on average.
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Not just words, but how we speak
• Children from low SES homes are more likely to hear
‘command language’ and prohibitions rather than
affirmations; opposite of high SES children
• High SES parents are more likely to ask questions and engage
in conversational ‘turns’ with children
• Children from higher SES homes are more likely to have been
read to: Adams (1990) found that poor children entered P1
with just 25 hours of having been read to compared with
1,000-1,700 hours for children from better-off families
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What is the long term effect?
• Many children enter kindergarten lagging
behind their peers
• Test performance in P-3 is strongly related to
early language proficiency
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Narrowing the Word Gap
• Because the word gap has such long term
implications, there are public policy issues
• First, some of the newest science:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLoEUEDqagQ
• And research based public policy intervention:
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26439798
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What w- ilSl INGAPORE
happen?

Will Concerted Efforts Help?
• We still don’t know but important that the efforts are
being followed by researchers to test the effects of
interventions
• There is a limit to what policies and interventions can
do: many observers have pointed out that
disadvantaged families face many obstacles, not just
language gaps
• Targeting families and what goes on at home –
preschool can help – Dana Suskind is now moving
her research into the classroom
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What Doesn’t Work?
“The worst thing that could come out of all this
interest in vocabulary is flash cards with pictures
making kids memorize a thousand words.”
- Dr. David Dickinson
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- From http://nyti.ms/VylGon

What Does Work?
The Three T’s
Dr. Dana Suskind from the University of Chicago has
suggested the 3 T’s as a core behavioural strategy
parents and teachers can use to help build vocabulary
• Tune In
• Talk More
• Take Turns
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Tune In
• Tune In means
– Paying attention
– Taking cues from the interests of the child –
what does the child want to talk about
• In the classroom, listen to their conversations
• At home, focus on what child is saying
– Young children will switch attention, you need to
keep up; tuning in is a dynamic activity
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Talk More
• Talk More means
– Using as many descriptive words as possible
– Take every opportunity to use descriptive
language
Something as simple as a banana at breakfast
can yield all kinds of descriptions:
Texture: smooth, mushy
Descriptors: yellow, brown, spotted, ripe, sweet
Synonyms: skin, peel; slice, piece
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Take Turns
• Take Turns means
– Conversational turns
– Back and forth
– This giving the child a chance to speak is
very important for language development;
even when the language is not command
driven, it can’t be just the parent or teacher
doing all the talking
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What Can Help?
In the Classroom:
• One study showed gains when preschoolers were
asked to do personal narration with trained
volunteers
• Classrooms where children given the opportunity for
maximum learning, esp. by extending their learning
through questions and responses but a US study
found only 15% of classrooms can be described that
way
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What Can Help?
In the Classroom:
• Dickinson and Tabors found that children in
preschool typically spend 60% of their time not
engaged in any conversation.
• Natural conversations, reading books while asking
lots of questions (What do you think happens next?
Why did she do that?), helping identify words during
playtime.
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What Can Help?
At Home:
• In households where mother tongue is spoken, important for
parents to use that to converse with infants and toddlers
• Talk with child, not at him – encourage conversational turns
by asking questions and responding to child’s statements and
interest
• Talk at length about past experiences: ‘remember we went to
grandma’s birthday party: who was there, what happened,’
etc. Use more elaborate descriptions to elicit questions.
• Use a positive tone; avoid relying on commands and directives
• Use words in context to reinforce their meaning: pan, bowl,
measuring cup, spices, rolling pin, whisk, etc. while baking
with a child helps connect vocabulary words and concepts.
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What Can Help?
Both at School and at Home :
• Reading. How often does reading occur in Singaporean
preschool classrooms?
– Ideal is at least daily. US and Sweden show declines
• Strategies for reading (from Strickland)
– Explain new and sophisticated vocabulary (act it out, use kid friendly
terms)
– Discuss narrative structure with children (who are the characters,
what is the setting, what is the problem)
– Link dilemmas or situations to child’s own life (what would she do?)
– Ask child to make predictions about what is going to happen next
– Focus on the printed text – underline with your finger the left to right
motion of reading, literally point out words
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What Can Help?
School-Home Partnership:
• Preschool teachers can help parents by explaining
the importance of talk for language development
• Suggest strategies to parents for talking to their
children
• Tell parents your strategy in class to help build
vocabulary
• Explain the vocabulary you are working on in class
and ask parents to help reinforce that at home
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Use what’s around you to converse
• How would you build a conversation around a traffic jam?
• What vocabulary would you highlight? What
predictions or inferences? What would you point out?
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• Later, can expand on it:

Want to Know More?
• http://www.aecf.org/m/resourcedoc/aecf-30millionwordgap-
2011.pdf
• http://www.naeyc.org/tyc/article/the-word-gap
• Risley and Hart
• http://fcd-us.
org/sites/default/files/Multilingual%20Children%20Beyond
%20Myths%20and%20Towards%20Best%20Practices.pdf
• http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/22/us/language-gap-study-
bolsters-a-push-for-pre-k.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
• http://prek.spps.org/uploads/class_findings_in_pre-k_
year.pdf
• http://tmw.org/tmw-initiative/
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ECDA 2014: Closing the Word Gap

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ECDA 2014: Closing the Word Gap