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

[Daniel Ginsberg]

There was an invited forum in Jnl Ling Anth earlier this year that debunked
a lot of this "word gap" discourse. I would love to see more public
awareness of this, and less uncritical citation of the highly flawed Hart &
Risley study.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jola.12071/full

--
Daniel Ginsberg
Doctoral candidate, Linguistics
Georgetown University
http://georgetown.academia.edu/DanielGinsberg

On Tue, Sep 15, 2015 at 7:27 AM, Francis Hult <francis.hult at englund.lu.se>
wrote:

> [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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>
>
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