[Edling] Why Boosting Poor Children’s Vocabulary Is Important for Public Health

[Francis Hult]

[Moderator's note: I post this story because it relates to a discourse that is gaining public traction.  I am reminded of an article that was recently posted to Edling:



Johnson, E.J. (2015) Debunking the “language gap”. Journal for Multicultural Education, 9(1), 42-50.



I wonder what perspectives list members working in different research traditions have on this topic.  What additional research findings and ideas should we be getting out to the public and how?  FMH]





The Atlantic



Why Boosting Poor Children’s Vocabulary Is Important for Public Health



Re­search sug­gests that poor chil­dren hear about 600 words per hour, while af­flu­ent chil­dren hear 2,000. By age 4, a poor child has a listen­ing vocab­u­lary of about 3,000 words, while a wealth­i­er child wields a 20,000-word listen­ing vocab­u­lary. So it’s no sur­prise that poor chil­dren tend to enter kinder­garten already be­hind their wealth­i­er peers.



But it’s not just the poverty that holds them back—it’s the lack of words. In fact, the single-best pre­dict­or of a child’s aca­dem­ic suc­cess is not par­ent­al edu­ca­tion or so­cioeco­nom­ic status, but rather the qual­ity and quantity of the words that a baby hears dur­ing his or her first three years.



Full story:
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/09/georgias-plan-to-close-the-30-million-word-gap-for-kids/403903/
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