[Reading-hall-of-fame] Mind the 30 Million Word Gap!

[tsticht at znet.com]

10/24/2014

Mind the 30 Million Word Gap!

Tom Sticht, International Consultant in Adult Education

Things are going to slide, slide in all directions. Won’t be nothing,
Nothing you can measure anymore. –[From the song “The Future” by Leonard
Cohen, Canadian Poet, Musician, Singer]

Americans love measurement. Sometimes, even when common sense reveals the
obvious truth of a proposition, it will be ignored until some form of
objective measurement is forthcoming to support the truth of the thought
expressed.  Today, there is underway in the United States a large
initiative aimed at closing the gap between the reading achievement of
children from poorer homes and those from affluent homes. Called the “30
million word gap”, the initiative is based on the appearance of
measurements based on the common sense observation that reading ability is
based on children’s earlier developed oral language ability.

An early expression of the common sense idea that reading ability is based
on the earlier acquired ability to listen to and speak the native oral
language is found in 1908 in Edmund Burke Huey’s classic book, “The
Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading.” In this book Huey wrote about the
relationship of oral to written language and said, “The child comes to his
first reader with his habits of spoken language fairly well formed, and
these habits grow more deeply set with every year. His meanings inhere in
this spoken language and belong but secondarily to the printed symbol.”

Jumping ahead a few decades, colleagues and I surveyed large numbers of
studies that measured relationships among children’s and adult’s listening
and reading skills. The results were first reported in a 1974 book called
“Auding and Reading: A Developmental Model” and a decade later additional
studies were summarized by Sticht & James in a chapter on “Listening and
Reading” in the 1984 Handbook of Reading Research. In this research we
found that in the early grades of school children comprehended better by
listening to rather than by reading of materials. But as they progressed
through school their listening and reading abilities improved and the  gap
between their listening and their reading ability closed until by around
the 6th to 8th grade levels they were able to comprehend equally well what
they listened to or read.

A  decade later, 1n 1995, another major research project, which measured the
relationships of oral language ability to written language achievement, lead
directly to the present “30 million word gap” initiatives. Betty Hart and
Todd Risley reported in their seminal book “Meaningful Differences in the
Everyday Experiences of Young American Children” (Paul H. Brookes
Publishing) their research which tracked the acquisition of oral vocabulary
of 42 children in the homes of welfare, working class, and professional
families for two and a half years. They estimated that from birth to 4
years of age welfare children would experience some 15 million words,
working class children around 30 million words, and children of
professional parents would experience some 45 million words. These
differences in words listened to lead to differences in oral vocabulary of
the children in these three groups and in turn these differences were
carried over into the school years resulting in similar differences in
reading achievement among these three groups.

In the Hart & Risley study, the difference between the number of words heard
by the children of the welfare and the professional  groups (45-15=30
million) formed the basis for the current  “30 million word gap”
initiatives.  In a June 25, 2014 White House Blog,  Maya Shankar, Senior
Advisor for the Social and Behavioral Sciences at the White House Office of
Science and Technology Policy said,  “Research shows that during the first
years of life, a poor child hears roughly 30 million fewer total words than
her more affluent peers. 
 This is what we call the “word gap,” and it can
lead to disparities not just in vocabulary size, but also in school
readiness, long-term educational and health outcomes, earnings, and family
stability even decades later
. That’s why today we are releasing a new
video message from President Obama focused on the importance of supporting
learning in our youngest children to help bridge the word gap and improve
their chances for later success in school and in life.”


Perhaps this new emphasis upon educating parents to develop their children’s
oral language skills will help children achieve higher education and
overcome the scourge of poverty in later life. Perhaps it will falsify
another common sense expectation:


“Everybody knows
the poor stay poor, the rich get rich. That’s how it goes.
Everybody knows. –[Leonard Cohen, “Everybody Knows”]


Mind the 30 Million Word Gap!

tsticht at aznet.net