Several studies have shown that young children from disadvantaged
homes are more likely to enter school with a tremendous vocabulary gap
when compared to their peers from more advantaged backgrounds. Some
experts estimate that the gap can mean about 30 million fewer words than
their more advantaged counterparts.
Writing for Education Week, Sarah D. Sparks supports
this finding by summarizing several studies, but she also explains that
a little-regarded factor in the poorer language acquisition for these
children is the quality of conversation that parents have with their
children. These children tend to enter school far behind their peers
and are unlikely to catch up in subsequent school years. Sparks reports
on one part of a significant study, Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experiences of Young Children, that
it’s important to do more than just bombard young children with words.
Associate professor in early language and communication and the
director of the Children’s Project in Kansas City, Kansas stated, “We
don’t want to just distill it down to a numbers game, because … the
important message to take away is not the poor versus wealthy families,
but the opportunities children have to interact with rich language.”
Jill Gilkerson, director of LENA Research Foundation in Boulder,
Colorado explains, “Conversational turns are vastly more important than
the number of words a child is exposed to.” Parents should work to
engage their young ones in back and forth exchanges and less “short
directives” because this does not create turns in conversation.
View this example of positive parent-child interaction from the article on the Education Week article:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=44&v=VV9pOkmnKCY
