Language Matters

Photo by Ian Britton at FreeFoto.com

When my daughter was two, a friend gave her a picture book that had more vocabulary words she'd never heard than words she knew.  Each page had 3-4 sentences on it and perhaps 3-4 words that she recognized.  I overheard her first exposure to the book:  the Giver sat down on the couch with the Toddler.  They looked at the colorful cover and began the story.  High interest faded fast.  She lasted about three pages.

A few days later I pulled the book out and "read" it to her.  I translated each page into toddler-speak as we went along, leaving 1-2 new words on each page.  I figured a little vocabulary-building couldn't hurt.  When we finished, she asked me to read it again. (That's toddler-speak for "I like it!") 

As I've written for children and teenagers I've tried to write on their level.  I don't want them to need someone to translate or lose interest because they don't understand what I've written.  Trying to write on-level, however, brings a couple problems:

•   Not all 3-year-olds (or 8-year-olds or 14-year-olds) are on the same level! 
•   I still think a little vocabulary-building is good.

Trying to balance my desire to write on level with my utopian-world concept of eager children excitedly learning new vocabulary has been an interesting line to walk.  I feel like the vocabulary in an article or book is a precise chemical equation that must be perfectly balanced, or (horror of all horrors!) it will never be read.  Because of the resistance to reading I've seen in junior high and high school students, I've tended toward the safer, on-level side of the writing equation.  A research project a friend introduced me to this week is shifting my attitude.  A little.

In 1983 Betty Hart and Todd Risley began a research project that wouldn't be complete and published until 1995.  They followed 42 families from upper, middle, lower, and welfare socio-economic levels for several years, recording and transcribing how much the parents talked to their babies.  What they discovered was astounding.  The average child in an upper socio-economic family heard 2153 words per hour while the average child in a welfare home heard 616 words per hour.  By the time a child turns four, that translates to almost 45 million words for the wealthier child and 13 million words for the poorer child.*  Even more interesting, the preschooler's vocabulary can be an indicator for how well they will perform in later years.  All this by the time they're four!

I've always thought vocabulary-building is good, but this makes me much less timid about introducing new words to kids!  Even if they don't know what each word means, it seems that the simple exposure is doing them good!  Also, books tend to have more opportunity to use language that isn't common in everyday conversations and speech.  It's okay to use complete sentences and appropriate grammar in books where in "real life" it might sound a little formal.

At three-and-a-half years old, my daughter still likes the picture book I mentioned earlier.  I haven't translated it for many months.  She's probably heard it over 100 times.  She still doesn't know what all the words mean, and I am perfectly okay with that.


* Read an NPR article about the research here: http://www.npr.org/2011/01/10/132740565/closing-the-achievement-gap-with-baby-talk.  The actual article Hart and Risley published is available here: http://www.elfrank.net/UFT/Articles/early%20catastrophe.pdf.