Raspberry column and "verbal skills"

[P. Kerim Friedman]

What does it mean to be a very bright baby?

We know from language acquisition and other child development studies
that all children go through the same developmental stages, even if
some do it at different times than others. This research seems to be
based on basic tasks such as arranging colored blocks or tying shoes.
But it isn't clear to me what aspects of "intelligence" these tasks are
actually measuring. Concentration? Following instructions? Pattern
recognition? I wonder if using Howard Gardner's notion of multiple
intelligences might have led to very different test results.

The other article discusses the fact that only 14% of Britain's working
class go to university. Now, this is clearly a statistic that varies by
country. Assuming (for the sake of argument) that all working class
people have restricted vocabularies, it seems that educational
differences would have to account for much of the variation.

- kerim


On Wednesday, September 3, 2003, at 11:10 AM, Timothy Mason wrote:

> Here is a ling to a report in the Observer on recent work carried out
> in the UK. The results suggest that skill-differences between
> working-class and middle-class children are already significant at the
> age of 22 months.
>
> http://observer.guardian.co.uk/education/story/0,12554,837171,00.html
>
> An article in today's Guardian looks at other findings by the same
> researcher (Leon Feinstein)
>
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1034403,00.html
>
> She writes :
>
> very bright children from poor homes and dim but rich babies at the
> other end of the scale were already on a steep trajectory in the
> opposite directions, the poor/bright travelling fast downwards, the
> rich/dim moving up. By nursery school at three, they have nearly
> converged. At the age of six, the children's lines cross and then
> diverge for evermore as they head off into opposite futures.
>
>
> This suggests that whatever schools or stupid teachers may be doing,
> the social factors underlying educational inequalities cannot all be
> blamed on the educational system. It also seems that language is a
> cognitive skill like any other, that skill in this domain is variable
> and that it varies for the same reasons as others do.
>
> Personally, this does not surprise me ; I worked for ten years
> training French primary-school teachers ; while much could be said
> about their recruitment and training, it was clearly the case that the
> majority of them cared about the children they were to teach, were
> aware of the difficulties faced by those in the underprivileged
> suburban schools that most young teachers start their careers in, and
> did their best to ensure that their young charges succeeded in
> mastering the material on the curriculum.
>
> School labeling processes coupled with a system of triage that puts
> children under increasing levels of stress may well play a role in the
> widening of the skill gap. But schooling alone does not account for > it.
>
> Best wishes
>
> Timothy Mason
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: text/enriched
Size: 3107 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/linganth/attachments/20030903/87e98149/attachment.bin>