Apr 9, 2021
Thinking Citizen Blog — The 30 Million Word Gap: Myth or Reality
Thinking Citizen Blog — Friday is Education and Education Policy Day
Today’s Topic: The 30 Million Word Gap: Myth or Reality? Who Cares? Who Should?
When I had my first child, I talked to him non-stop. Instinctively. When I took him outside for a walk, I would describe everything I saw. I wondered what other parents did. I had no idea. The kid did not come with an instruction book attached. Years later I read about a “30 million word gap.” And I felt very sad. Were millions of children being deprived of the stimulation that I instinctively gave my son? How horrible. But more recently I have heard that this “gap” is not fact but fiction. So I decided to find out what the controversy is all about. Experts — please chime in. Correct, elaborate, elucidate.
HART AND RISLEY STUDY (1995): 45 million v 26 million v 13 million
1. “In four years an average child in a professional family would experience 45 million words, an average child in a working class family 26 million, and an average child in a welfare family 13 million.”
2. “We were awestruck by how much our measures of accomplishments at age 3 predicted measures of language skills at age 9 or 10.”
3. Betty Hart was a Professor at the University of Kansas, Todd R. Risley was a Professor at the University of Alaska. They had collaborated for 35 years. In the 1960s, they had both worked as researchers during the War on Poverty trying to figure out how “to intervene early to forestall the terrible effects that poverty was having on some children’ academic growth.”
NB: “The study concerned not only the quantity, but also the nature, of the verbal interactions between children and parents. Factors they considered important included the ratio of encouragements to prohibitions in the input to the child and the extent to which parents followed up on topics initiated by the child.”
2017 STUDY: much larger study, reveals “much smaller” gap — but still huge
1. The Hart and Risley study of 1995 involved 42 families. The 2017 study was much larger — 329 families.
2. The conclusion was the that the gap was much smaller — four million not 30 million words. Still sounds huge to me.
3. Other studies have concluded that the original analysis was culturally biased.
NB: “Garcia and Otheguy (2016) implies the Language and Achievement Gap derive from racist ideals that reinforce the idea that some cultures are seen as “disadvantaged”. To place the blame on different backgrounds is to invalidate their way to make meaning just because they have different cultures. Thus, to not consider the responsibility of the schooling system is to promote the homogeneity of Standardized English and this notion that anyone who does not speak or understand it is inferior and prone to future failure. Garcia argues it delegitimatizes backgrounds of families and their linguistic and cultural practices because it is not seen to be “successful” in the eyes of the education system.”
PRIVATE AND PUBLIC INITIATIVES PLUS THE “OXFORD WORD GAP”
1.”In 2013 Bloomberg Philanthropies Mayors Challenge awarded Providence, Rhode Island its grand prize to “Providence Talks” — a project inspired by Hart and Risley’s work.
2. “Talk With Me Baby” is a Georgia program “that provides professional development of nurses, who will then coach new parents how they should talk to their children.”
3. “The University of Chicago School of Medicine’s Thirty Million Words Initiative provides intervention for caregivers and teaches to show them how to optimize their talk with their kids.”
NB: “The Oxford Word Gap is used to describe the word gap found between races and socioeconomic classes in the UK.” There the seminal study was “Why Closing the Word Gap Matters: Oxford Language Report.” Findings of a survey of over 1000 teachers in the UK: “Over half of those surveyed reported that at least 40% of their pupils lacked the vocabulary to access their learning. 69% of primary school teachers and over 60% of secondary school teachers believe the word gap is increasing.”
FINAL WORD
1. Is there a significant word gap?
2. How big? What are the thresholds of significance?
3. What are the world’s best practices with respect to closing it?
NB: What are the world’s best practices with respect to maximizing the learning of infants? whether through music, story telling, physical activity?
THANK YOU
To Megan Satterthwaite Freiman for her help with this post.
https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/periodicals/TheEarlyCatastrophe.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_gap
https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/06/01/615188051/lets-stop-talking-about-the-30-million-word-gap
https://pubs.asha.org/doi/10.1044/2016_AJSLP-15-0169
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betty_Hart
https://www.oup.com.cn/test/word-gap.pdf
Hart, B., & Risley, T. (1992). American parenting of language-learning children: Persisting differences in family-child interactions observed in natural home environments. Developmental Psychology, 28, 1096–1105.
Sperry, D. D., Sperry, L. L., & Miller, P. J. (2018). Reexamining the Verbal Environments of Children From Different Socioeconomic Backgrounds. Child Development, 1–16.
THE LAST THREE YEARS OF POSTS ORGANIZED THEMATICALLY ARE AVAILABLE HERE:
PDF with headlines — Google Drive
YOUR TURN
Please share the coolest thing you learned in the last week related to education or education policy. Or the coolest thought however half-baked you had. Or the coolest, most important thing you learned in your life related to education or education policy that the rest of us may have missed.
