critiques of parent word-count studies?

[Christine Mallinson]

In my book with Anne Charity-Hudley, we critiqued word count studies such
as Hart & Risley's, from a language and education perspective, particularly
affecting students who speak non-standardized varieties of English.

These and other standardized tests:
- often presume that all students know certain standardized English
vocabulary items
- often are not adequately normed to the population being generalized to
- often are based on visits to the home by researchers (raising issues such
as the observers paradox, asymmetric power relations between examiner and
examinee, cross-cultural issues)
- often don't consider issues of language variation and simply tally
'wordcount'
- often overreach in their conclusions and present decontextualized
findings that can lead to stereotyping and inaccurate 'support' for deficit
models

See Chapter 5 (and especially pp. 129-132) of:  Understanding English
Language Variation in U.S. Schools <http://amzn.to/95X8wA>, 2011, by Anne
H. Charity Hudley and Christine Mallinson

http://amzn.to/95X8wA

Christine

Christine Mallinson, PhD
http://christinemallinson.com
University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC)
Associate Professor, Language, Literacy & Culture Program
Affiliate Associate Professor, Gender & Women's Studies Program


On Mon, Apr 29, 2013 at 1:30 AM, Susan M. ERVIN-TRIPP <
ervintripp at berkeley.edu> wrote:

> The earlier work on this by Hart and Risley 1992 and by Walker 1994
> followed parent speech and child
> speech in a variety of families, and found that higher vocabulary and MLU
> were related to speech to children,
> especially constructive involvement such as asking questions, repeating or
> expanding the child's utterance and encouraging rather than prohibiting
> exploration. That was the highest predictor.Also related: amount of verbal
> exchange with children, use of many different words, accommodation by
> taking turns and accommodating one's own MLU. In an experimental study,
> Camaoni and Longobardi had mothers interrupt by overlapping, ignoring the
> child's topic initiations, Those who did this delayed the development of
> vocabulary and fluency four months later. The opposite, reformulating,
> expanding paraphrasing etc. accelerated linguistic development.
> These studies also showed correlates with SES. Notice these are not about
> content or structure (except prohibitions are content), but they had strong
> effects on school performance such as reading scores and IQ measures. And
> these studies were in US and Italy.They were not done by linguists hence
> not about structure.
>
>
> On Sun, Apr 28, 2013 at 7:27 PM, galey modan <gmodan at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I recently read the NY Times opinion piece, linked below, about studies
> > showing that the number of words parents say to their children in a given
> > time period is linked to socioeconomic class and is a predictor of future
> > academic success. Although I'm not a language acquisition specialist,
> these
> > seem like bizarre and linguistically un-sound studies (at least from the
> NY
> > Times piece, it seems like all they're doing is counting words, rather
> than
> > looking at any content or structure.) Does anyone know of any recent
> > linguistic/ ling anth critiques of this kind of work, other than the
> > somewhat related Ochs and Heath?
> >
> > thanks,
> >
> > Galey Modan
> >
>