| Teachers have known for years that some children come to kindergarten with a wealth of literary experience and a strong vocabulary while others lag far behind their peers even from the first day of school. Over the years, these children continue to struggle with learning to read and most never catch up with their peers in school performance. We now have the research that tells us how important early language development really is for children. Betty Hart and Todd Risley studied 42 children from Kansas City welfare, working class and professional families from birth to age 3. During the study, Hart and Risley observed the children in the home environment in order to track the type of oral language and vocabulary experiences that each child had during these critical early years. Researchers state, "By the time the children were 3 years old, trends in amount of talk, vocabulary growth, and style of interaction were well established and clearly suggested widening gaps to come." By age 3, children living in professional families had a recorded vocabulary size of 1,116 words with average utterances per hour of 310. Children in the working class families had a recorded vocabulary size of 749 words with average utterances per hour of 223. Welfare children had a recorded vocabulary size of only 525 words with only 168 utterances per hour. Hart and Risley point out, "a linear extrapolation from the averages in the observational data to a 100-hour week shows the average child in the professional family with 215,000 words of language experience, the average child in a working-class family provided with 125,000 words, and the average in a welfare family with 62,000 words of language experience." In a year, this is a difference of 11.2 words for the child living with professional parents while only 3.2 million words for a child living in a welfare family. The difference over three years would be 45 million words for the child in a professional family versus only 13 million words for the child living in poverty. Thus, an estimated 30-32 million word gap by age 3. Follow up studies done with these children at ages 5 and 9 continued to show the same gaps as were evident at age 3. |
In a 1997 study by Scanlon and Vellutino, it was found that kindergarten students who came to school with little literary background were more successful when they were taught by kindergarten teachers who spent a large amount of instructional time analyzing the structural aspects of the spoken and written word with their students. In an article titled, "30 Years of Research: What we now know about how children learn to read: A synthesis of research on reading," Grossen says that the following conclusions are apparent:
1) Phonemic awareness should be directly taught at an early age for all young students.
2) Sound-spelling relationships should be explicitly taught to students.
3) High frequency sound-spelling patterns should be regularly and systematically taught to students.
4) Students should be directly taught strategies to sound out words.
5) Teachers should use connected, decodable text to explicitly practice the sounds being taught. Students should use this text to practice sound-symbol relationships. No skills should ever be taught in isolation.
6) Interesting stories that do not use decodable text should also be used with students on a regular basis to develop language, vocabulary and comprehension skills. |
The students of today are often called the "Millennial" generation. They are well entrenched into the "digital age" and are comfortable with cell phones, iPods, iPads, texting, downloading music, digital pictures, socialnetworking and instant messaging. According to Howe and Strauss (2000), members of the millennial generation are optomistic, team players. They follow the rules and accept authority more easily than did their parents. Researchers say that millennials have 7 distinguishing characteristics: special, sheltered, confident, team oriented, achieving, pressured and conventional.
According to Diane Oblinger in a report called, "Boomers, Gen-Xers and Millennials: Understanding the New Student" Millennials, students who were born after 1982, share 7 important characteristics that make them different from previous generations. These characteristics are:
1) They gravitate toward group activity.
2) They identify with their parents' values and feel close to their parents.
3) They spend more time doing homework and housework and less time watching tv.
4) They believe it is "cool" to be smart.
5) They are facinated by new technologies and use them regularly.
6) They are racially and ethnically diverse.
7) At least 1 in 5 have at least one immigrant parent.
Oblinger states that Millennials learning preferences tend toward teamwork, experiential activities, structure, and the use of technology. Their strengths are: multi-tasking, goal orientation, positive attitude and using a collaborative style.
Based on this information, classrooms need to change to capitalize on the strengths and interets of the students we serve. We can help students set focused and reasonable learning goals and encourage them to work in teams. We can help them develop social groups that support learning and help them connect their experiences in problem-solving and experimentation to the world of learning. We must also use technology to help them direct their learning such as through the use of smart-boards, iPods, iPads, blogs and interactive technology. Text must include not just the textbook but also trade books, internet research, song lyrics, electronic simulations and "online field trips," movies, newspapers (print and online), print from everyday life, manuals, and other types of technical print.
According to Vogt and McLaughlin (2004), people today are bombarded wtih large amounts of text in our daily lives. This requires us as readers to not only read, but to analyze, synthesize and respond - often with a sense of urgency and immediacy to the information with which we are presented. The jobs most of our students will do in the future most likely have not even been created yet. As a result, our teaching must leave behind the obsolete "factory model" and capture the realities of life in the 21st century and beyond. We must prepare our students to be not only strong readers, but also thinkers, questioners, and managers of text and information. Education must prepare students to meet the demands of a world as yet undefined. Like it or not - that is what being a teacher in the 21st century requires of all of us. |
