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

[Daniel Ginsberg]

I think they'd question the empirical basis for that claim. It's usually
cited to Hart & Risley 1995, which as I mentioned is a highly flawed piece
of work. Here's a thorough critical response to it:
http://academic.evergreen.edu/curricular/med/LangPoor.pdf There's a lot
there in a relatively short article, but here's a key quote for this
discussion:

Many educational researchers and policy makers have generalized the
> findings about the language and culture of the 6 welfare families in Hart
> and Risley’s study to all poor families. Yet, Hart and Risley offer no
> compelling reason to believe that the poor families they studied have much
> in common with poor families in other communities, or even in Kansas City
> for that matter. The primary selection criterion for participation in this
> study was socioeconomic status; therefore, all the 6 welfare families had
> in common was income, a willingness to participate in the study, race (all
> the welfare families were Black), and geography (all lived in the Kansas
> City area). Families living in poverty are, however, an ethnically,
> linguistically, and racially diverse group (US Census Bureau, 2003). Strong
> claims about the language and culture of families living in poverty based
> on a sample of 6 Black welfare families living in Kansas City are
> unwarranted. (p. 364)
>

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

On Wed, Sep 16, 2015 at 4:22 AM, Richard Hudson <r.hudson at ucl.ac.uk> wrote:

> Hello again Daniel. Thanks for the interesting link. Would you agree that
> even these researchers accept that poor children reach school with fewer
> words than rich children?
>
> Dick Hudson
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On 15/09/2015 21:51, Daniel Ginsberg wrote:
>
> 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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>
> --
> Richard Hudson (dickhudson.com)
>
>
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