WORD, WORLD KNOWLEDGE BUILDS KIDS' VOCABULARIES

Saturday, April 12, 2003

Fourth grade, said reading expert Jeanne Chall, is the time when schoolchildren typically shift from ``learning to read'' to ``reading to learn.''

Children learning to read are coming to understand how the alphabet works, mastering the skill of decoding words and becoming fluent in understanding text containing familiar words and content.

Children reading to learn -- adults, too, since it's what we do all our lives -- use their established reading skills to master new domains of knowledge and experience.

Disadvantaged children often have particular difficulty making the shift, a problem teachers sometimes call ``the fourth-grade slump.'' The spring issue of American Educator, the quarterly journal of the American Federation of Teachers, examines the problem and what might be done to mitigate it (see articles at www.aft.org/american-educator/).

Though there are effective programs to teach children to decode accurately and fluently, E.D. Hirsch Jr. writes in one article, the effective teaching of reading comprehension remains ``a recalcitrant problem.'' That's because the more words you already know, the easier it is to learn the meaning of the new ones you encounter when you read, and by the time they come to school, children differ greatly in how many words they already know.

When children are still learning to decode, the total size of their vocabulary doesn't matter much, because their reading words are all familiar from spoken language. It's when they begin encountering lots of new words in their textbooks that the gap in language skills is revealed.

And it widens over time.

In another article in the journal, ``Early Catastrophe: The 30 million word gap by age 3,'' Betty Hart and Todd Risley document the enormous difference in early language experience. They recorded more than 1,300 hours of parent-child conversation for 42 children from age 7 months to three years, whose parents included university professors, middle-income working parents, and parents on welfare.

Professors talk a lot, so it isn't surprising that in an average recorded hour they said more and used more different words than the adults in the other groups.

But even their children -- not older than 3, remember -- used more different words in an hour than the adults in the other groups. By age 3 or 4, researchers estimated, the professionals' children had heard a total of tens of millions of words more than the children in the least verbal families. And the effects were still apparent when the researchers did a follow-up study of the children in third grade.

Hart and Risley, when they began their research, were looking for an intervention that would preserve gains children made in an experimental program. They're as convinced as ever of the urgency of the problem, but they also understand better why it is so difficult.

Hirsch is persuaded that the schools could do far more than they do to close the vocabulary gap. Teaching new vocabulary explicitly is only a small part of the solution; it's too slow. A well-read 12th-grader knows some 80,000 words (by some estimates many more, and that's not including names and places and other fact-type words). Most of them are acquired gradually and unconsciously, as our first spoken words are, by encountering them frequently in context.

Start early, Hirsch suggests, ``to build word and world knowledge.'' Apart from the time spent specifically on decoding skills, where it is appropriate to limit vocabulary to build confidence, much of the time spent on language arts is a wasted opportunity to introduce children to new words and concepts. When teachers read aloud, the material should be a couple of years ahead of the children's own reading skills, and should be followed by class discussion of the new topics for further practice.

There should be more nonfiction, and less time spent on ``formal comprehension'' strategies such as predicting, classifying and looking for the main idea. A few lessons on these things might be useful, but research shows, Hirsch says, that ``after a quick initial bump, there's a plateau or ceiling in the positive effects, and little further benefit.''

Also, Hirsch notes, children are pretty good at figuring out the inference implied by, ``Shut up! I'm trying to read.'' What children lack is not so much techniques for inference as the relevant factual knowledge they need to make inferences from.

A really good school program, Hirsch concludes, is inherently egalitarian and compensatory. It has a bigger effect on low-income children because they typically have more to learn, and if the program is effective they begin to catch up. A weak program, on the other hand, does more damage to low-income students because they need more from school than their more advantaged peers.

Good stuff. Check it out.