Aaaargh, again. (Program enlists Santa Ana parents as 'first teachers')

[Ronald Kephart]

At 12:39 PM -0700 9/10/04, Aurolyn Luykx wrote:

>Is anyone else out there suspicious of articles that cite that old
>study about low-income parents speaking on average 300 fewer words
>per hour to their children?...

And even if they do, what does it really mean? Don't we have
ethnographic evidence of normal language development among children
who are hardly *spoken to* at all, until they themselves have begun
to talk well enough to be considered worthy conversational partners?

>Maybe we need a program whereby linguists go into the homes of
>journalists to educate THEM.

What we really need is programs that teach linguistics in schools. I
mean, we don't teach 19th-century biology, do we (unless we happen to
be in Texas)? Why do we still (apparently) teach 19th-century ideas
about language?

Ron