Chapter One: Why read aloud?
What are the skills a child needs for kindergarten?
There is one skill that matters above all others, because it is the prime predictor of school success or failure: the child’s vocabulary upon entering school. Yes, the child goes to school to learn new words, but the words he or she already knows determine how much of what the teacher says will be understood. And since most instruction for the first four years of school is oral, the child who has the largest vocabulary will understand the most, while the child with the smallest vocabulary grasps the least.
Once they begin reading, personal vocabulary feeds (or frustrates) comprehension. And, since school grows increasingly complicated with each grade, that's why school-entry vocabulary tests predict so accurately.
How is It that some kids get a head start on vocabulary?
Conversation is the prime garden in which vocabulary grows, but conversations vary greatly from home to home. Consider the eye-opening findings of Drs. Betty Hart and Todd Risley at the University of Kansas from their research on children’s early lives. But before I share that, let me tell you how I share this with parents, because I'm often asked by educators how I manage to share this without insulting someone. Here's how I introduced it to 150 Title 1 (poverty) parents in Tennessee one morning:
"I'm going to tell you a secret now—a government secret. It's the equivalent of all that smoking and cancer research—except this tells us why certain kids' brains live long and why other children's brain's die young. The government has known this since 1996, yet no president has talked about it publicly, Democrat or Republican, no governor will talk about it. They're all afraid that if they shared this research, some of you might be insulted and then they'd lose votes. Instead, they told you a lie, that it was all the fault of schools and the awful teachers. That gets them some votes—but it's a lie. I'm not running for office, so I don't have to lie. I hope you're not insulted by what I'm going to tell you, but—honestly? I'm more interested in helping your child than saving your feelings. So here's the secret. Here's what helps your children the most and here's what hurts them the most."
And then I told them about the research you'll read next. They gave me a standing ovation, so I guess they felt more informed than insulted.
Published as Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children,17 the research began in response to what Hart and Risley saw among the four-year-olds in the university lab school. With many children, the lines were already drawn. Some were far advanced and some far behind. When these same children were tested at age three and then again at nine, the differences held. What caused the differences so early?
The researchers began by identifying 42 normal families representing three socioeconomic groups: welfare, working class, and professional. Beginning when the children were seven months old, researchers visited the homes for one hour a month, and continued their visits for two and one-half years. During each visit, the researcher tape-recorded and transcribed by hand any conversations and actions taking place in front of the child.
Through 1,300 hours of visits, they accumulated 23 million bytes of information for the project database, categorizing every word (noun, verb, adjective, etc.) said in front of the child.
The project held some surprises: Regardless of socioeconomic level, all 42 families said and did the same things with their children. In other words, the basic instincts of good parenting are there for most people, rich or poor.
And then the researchers received the data printout and saw the “meaningful differences” among the 42 families.
hen the daily number of words for each group of children was projected across four years, the four-year-old child from the professional family will have heard 45 million words, the working-class child 26 million, and the welfare child only 13 million. All three children will show up for kindergarten on the same day, but one will have heard 32 million fewer words. If No Child Left Behind expects the teacher to get this child caught-up, she'll have to speak 10 words a second for 900 hours to reach the 32-million mark by year's end. I hope they have life support ready for her.
The word gap among those children has nothing to do with how much those parents love them. They all love their children and want the best for them, but some parents have a better idea of what needs to be said and done to reach that best. They know the child needs to hear words repeatedly in meaningful sentences and questions, and they know that plunking a two-year-old down in front of a television set for three hours at a time is more harmful than meaningful. Sociologists Farkas and Beron studied the research on 6,800 children from ages 3 to 12, and found that children from the lower SES were far more likely to arrive at school with smaller vocabularies (12-14 months behind) and they seldom made up the loss as they grew older.18 (See the summer-loss chart.)
The message in this kind of research is unambiguous: It’s not the toys in the house that make the difference in children’s lives; it’s the words in their heads. The least expensive thing we can give a child outside of a hug turns out to be the most valuable: words. You don’t need a job, a checking account, or even a high school diploma to talk with a child. If I could select any piece of research that all parents would be exposed to, Meaningful Differences would be the one. And that's feasible. The authors took their 268-page book and condensed it into a six-page article for American Educator (Spring, 2003), the journal of the American Federation of Teachers, which may be freely reproduced by schools.19
If schools are to enlist the help of the 7,800-hour curriculum, then we must stop telling parents lies about schools, and the truth about what helps and hurts children the most.
In the Spring of 2003, the Policy Information Center of Educational Testing Service (ETS) published a report called Reading and Literacy in America, describing the wide and growing literacy gap between American social classes, one they could trace all the way back to kindergarten. According to ETS' research, little of what occurs between kindergarten and 12th grade changes the chasm of achievement uncovered in the findings of Hart and Risley. To view charts of their findings, see Income-Literacy.
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The 1995 Hart & Risley Study
Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children describes the remarkable findings of Betty Hart, Ph.D., and Todd R. Risley, Ph.D. Their longitudinal study of parent-child talk in families in Kansas was conducted over a decade. A team of researchers recorded one full hour of every word spoken at home between parent and child in 42 families over a three year period, with children from seven months to 36 months of age. The team then spent six additional years typing, coding, and analyzing 30,000 pages of transcripts.
Follow-up studies by Hart and Risley of those same children at age nine showed that there was a very tight link between the academic success of a child and the number of words the child’s parents spoke to the child to age three.
Hart and Risley’s Three Key Findings:
1. The variation in children’s IQs and language abilities is relative to the amount parents speak to their children.
2. Children’s academic successes at ages nine and ten are attributable to the amount of talk they hear from birth to age three.
3. Parents of advanced children talk significantly more to their children than parents of children who are not as advanced.
· “With few exceptions, the more parents talked to their children, the faster the children’s vocabularies were growing and the higher the children’s IQ test scores at age three and later.”· “The data revealed that the most important aspect of children’s language experience is its amount.” / · “Differences in the amount of cumulative experience children had... were strongly linked to differences at age three in children’s rates of vocabulary growth, vocabulary use, and general accomplishments and strongly linked to differences in school performance at age nine.”
Betty Hart, Ph.D. and Todd R. Risley, Ph.D.
The Authors of Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children
In the early 1960s, Drs. Hart and Risley demonstrated the power of learning principles influencing young children. Along with a colleague, they introduced parenting techniques such as time-out. Procedures such as shaping speech and language now widely used in special education were also introduced by the team.
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Chapter 5: SSR—sustained silent reading,
reading aloud's silent partner—continued
What are the exact benefits of SSR?
The benefits vary by the individual, but in its simplest form SSR allows a person to read long enough and far enough so the act of reading becomes automatic. If one must stop to concentrate on each word—sounding it out and searching for meaning—then fluency is lost along with meaning. It is also fatiguing. Being able to do it automatically isthe goal.9 To achieve this, the Commission on Reading (Becoming a Nation of Readers) recommended two hours a week of independent reading. Where do you find that time? The commission recommended less time be spent on skill sheets and workbooks.10
Because it is supposed to be informal and free of grades, SSR also provides students with a new perspective on reading—as a form of recreation. Judging from educated adults who come home each evening and think they can only relax by watching television, there is a critical need for such lessons in childhood.
Restricted to just basals, she'll be ill-prepared
for real reading.
n the secondary level, SSR may not cause an immediate or short term change in student skills (no “quick fix”), but it can result in positive changes in attitude toward the library, voluntary reading, assigned reading, and the importance of reading. This affects the amount students read and thus their facility with the process.11
Younger readers, however, show significant improvement in both attitude and skills with SSR. “Poor readers,” points out Richard Allington,12 a leading researcher and president of the International Reading Association, “when given ten minutes a day to read, initially will achieve five hundred words and quickly increase that amount in the same period as proficiency grows.”13
By third grade, SSR can be the student’s most important vocabulary builder, more so than with basal textbooks or even daily oral language. The Commission on Reading noted: “Basal readers and textbooks do not offer the same richness of vocabulary, sentence structure, or literary form as do trade books. . . . A diet consisting only of basal stories probably will not prepare children well to deal with real literature.”14 Indeed, about half of the 3,000 most commonly used words are not even included in K–6 basals.15 As shown in the chart below, printed material introduces three to six times more rare words than conversation does.
What would cause SSR to fail?
The McCrackens report that most instances where SSR fails are due to:
1. Teachers (or aides) who are supervising instead of reading
2. Classrooms that lack enough SSR reading materials
The McCrackens cite the teacher as a critical role model in SSR, reporting widespread imitation by students of the teacher’s reading habits.16 Students in one class noticed the teacher interrupting her reading to look up words in the dictionary and began doing the same. When a junior high teacher began to read the daily newspaper each day, the class began doing the same.
Here's an example of an entire nation that practiced SSR successfully for four decades and then ran into a snag. As a reading model, Japan has been unrivaled in the world. Its citizens consume enormous amounts of print, and lead the world in newspaper readership (64 percent of Japanese adults read a daily newspaper, compared to 23 percent in the U.S.17) Few outsiders, however, understand the reason behind the Japanese numbers: time. No, they get the same 24 hours everyone else gets, but they get them in different doses.
Hours and hours of mass transit time gave the Japanese lots of time for reading—then the "thumb
tribe" arrived.
Japan's highway tolls have long been among the highest in the world. A U.S. toll of $14 would be $47 in Japan, unless there's a bridge to cross and then it jumps to $97. The result is that almost everyone takes public transportation to work, commutes that often average an hour each way.18 This allows for 120 uninterrupted daily minutes of either reading or napping. All that time and all that reading put Japan at the top of book, magazine, and newspaper consumption—that is, until the mid 1990s.
That's when Japanese readership began to drop, and continues to drop.19 The cause was the arrival of what they call the "thumb tribe"—commuters with computer games, email, cell phones, and laptops. In short, distractions.
The more distractions confronting a nation, a family, or a class, the less reading accomplished. If you really want to get more reading done, then take control of your distractions: needless trips to the mall, land phones and cell phones, multiple televisions, DVD players, emails, computer games—each calling for immediate attention or multi-tasking. The "thumb tribe" is flourishing in America as well. (For more on the subject of distractions in reading achievement, see Distractions.)