The Science of Language: What the Science Says

Language Experiences of Disadvantaged Children

In The Reading Crisis: Why Poor Children Fall Behind, famed researcher Jeanne Chall observed that a "fourth-grade slump" occurs at the point where children make the critical transition from "learning to read" to "reading to learn" - that is, when children begin to encounter more difficult, abstract, or "literary" words.

These words are more likely to be outside the vocabularies of poor children, according to Betty Hart and Todd Risley. In their landmark study, Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experiences of Young American Children, Hart and Risley found that children whose parents receive welfare have fewer than half the vocabulary words of children whose parents hold professional positions.

Hart and Risley concluded that this is largely the result of how language is used in their respective homes. In their study, a typical child in a welfare household heard just 616 words per hour, less than half the number heard by a child in a working-class home (1,251 words per hour) and less than one third of the words heard in a household headed by professionals (2,153 words per hour). Hart and Risley also found that poor children add vocabulary words more slowly than their cohorts from more affluent families.

Language: Context for Understanding

Having little context with which to fill in the meaning of unknown words, disadvantaged children find it harder to comprehend or enjoy what they read.

To visualize this experience, consider a tapestry, in which threads representing language structure are woven across threads representing the meaning children gain from their oral language experiences. When the weave is tight with rich oral language, children easily understand the topic and make the connections necessary to infer the meanings of new words - continually adding to their vocabularies and skills. Conversely, when children do not have sufficient vocabularies, their contextual weave is too loose; they do not fully understand what they read and do not gain new skills as they read.

Learn more about how the tapestry of language and context affects children's ability to read for comprehension. See how a child's experiences with oral language affect reading comprehension.

 

The Matthew Effect

Lacking full comprehension, disadvantaged children generally read fewer and easier books - which, in turn, leads to a widening gap in skills between them and the more affluent students. Researcher Keith Stanovich called this phenomenon the Matthew Effect, referring to a biblical passage commonly paraphrased as, "The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer."

Reading research has confirmed this to be the case. In a follow-up to Chall's study, disadvantaged students who were a year behind the norm for word meaning in 4th grade had fallen to two years behind by 7th grade. Their oral reading and silent reading comprehension also had begun to decline by grades 6 and 7. In 11th grade, reading scores of these low-income students had fallen to the 25th percentile. A 1998 study by Cunningham and Stanovich reported that vocabulary in first grade predicts more than 30 percent of 11th-grade reading comprehension.

A Call for Explicit Vocabulary Instruction

Noted researcher Andrew Biemiller identifies vocabulary as the "'missing link' in reading/language instruction in our school system." Biemiller explains, "What is missing for many children who master phonics but don't comprehend well is vocabulary, the words they need to know in order to understand what they're reading .... Because vocabulary deficits particularly affect less advantaged and second-language children, ... such 'deficits' are fundamentally more remediable than many other school learning problems."

Similarly, in its 2002 report Reading for Understanding: Toward an R & D Program in Reading Comprehension, the RAND Reading Study Group reinforces the importance of this effort. To avoid students hitting the wall following 3rd grade, the report says, schools "must teach comprehension explicitly, beginning in the primary grades and continuing through high school."