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

Sat Oct 25 00:32:33 BST 2014

Greetings,

OK but I have, as Tom pointed out, hear this for many decades too.  So, I raise the following question for discussion and consideration:  What else counts, when exploring class differences as well as experiential differences.

Some comments from personal experience as a reading teacher in the LA schools (in the 1960's) to formal research.

When I was a reading teacher in LA City, we did a systematic analysis of students on 4 measures-- two comprehension, 1 phonemic awareness, and one phonetic analysis skills.  We also tracked over 4 years at what level students who came to school looking bilingual hit a wall grammatically and in conceptual development.  At second grade the grammatical structures and meanings became more complex and students started having trouble, not in decoding but in what words meant.  This is an issue that Michael Agar would argue is languaculture.  Culture is the surface of language and Culture is constructed through language. Culture is a conceptual system.  This focus on # of words begs larger problems.

Jenny Cook-Gumperz in her book on Maternal Socialization Styles test the hypothesis that Basil Bernstein argued in the 1970's that poor students speak in restricted codes and more advantaged students speak in elaborated codes.  In a systematic study of mother-child interactions, she found that statistically there was as much variation within class as across classes.  This challenges the approach that merely counts words.  How were the words used?  How did they function in interactions.  This was a statistically based study.  Functions of Language in the Classroom (1972), Cazden, John & Hymes explore some of these issues.  This is a foundational text that deconstructs deficit models.  This new report, without explore the actual processes and practices of language-in-use, not just word counts, seems to re-invent the deficit arguments again.  

Thoughts about how to count diversity and explore the relationships of class, economic status and other dimensions.  Those issues as Tom shows here were discussed and explored in the 1960's and 1970's in ways that seem to be invisible today.  Is it time to retriece the history of ideas as he demonstrates?

Just wondering where thoughts are today,
Judith Green
> On Oct 24, 2014, at 3:49 PM, tsticht at znet.com wrote:
> 
> 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
> 
> 
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