Beginning Literacy with Language: Young Children Learning at Home and School - Softcover

David K. Dickinson, Ed.D., Associate Dean for Research and Strategic Initiatives and Margaret Cowan Chair of Education, Peabody College of Education, Vanderbilt University, PMB 230, 230 Appleton Place, Nashville, Tennessee 37203-5721

David K. Dickinson received his doctorate from Harvard University's Graduate School of Education after teaching elementary school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania while earning his master’s degree at Temple University. For over 30 years, he has studied early language and literacy development among children from low-income backgrounds. Using observational and intervention research, he has sought to understand factors that foster short- and long-term development of language and reading comprehension and to improve the quality of support children receive. He has co-authored the widely used preschool curriculum, Opening the World of Learning (OWL), co-authored three volumes of The Handbook of Early Literacy Research, authored or co-authored over 100 peer review articles and spoken to practitioner and research audiences around the world.

Prior to beginning her doctoral studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1981, Patton O. Tabors was an elementary school teacher and a childbirth educator. During her doctoral studies she focused on first and second language acquisition in young children. Her qualifying paper and dissertation research, based on 2 years of ethnographic investigation in a nursery school classroom, described the developmental pathway of a group of young children learning English as a second language. She was able to use this information as the basis for the material in One Child, Two Languages: A Guide for Preschool Educators of Children Learning English as a Second Language (Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co., 1997). Since 1987, Dr. Tabors was the research coordinator of the Home-School Study of Language and Literacy Development in collaboration with Catherine Snow and David Dickinson. During this time she also directed research related to low-education and low-income mothers reading to their preschool-age children as part of the Manpower Development Research Corporation evaluations of two welfare-to-work projects, New Chance and JOBS, and for the Harvard Language Diversity Project, a subproject of the New England Research Center on Head Start Quality, directed by David Dickinson. Dr. Tabors's latest research, a longitudinal project that was following the language and literacy development of Spanish-speaking children from preschool to second grade, combined her interests in early language and literacy development and second language acquisition in young children.

Language Development in the Preschool Years

Parents and early childhood educators want children to become good readers and writers. They are fully aware of how crucial reading and writing skills are to school success. But parents and early childhood educators may not know how important language development is in preparing preschool-age children for later literacy development. The purpose of this book is to provide information to parents and early childhood educators about the connections between young children's early language development and later literacy development so that they can support and facilitate young children's language skills both at home and in early care and education.

The material in this book is based on the findings of a research project, the Home-School Study of Language and Literacy Development, carried out since 1987 by a collaborative research team composed of members from the Harvard Graduate School of Education; Tufts University; Clark University; and the Education Development Center in Newton, Massachusetts. Researchers in this study have collected data in the homes and preschool, elementary school, and high school classrooms of a group of children from low-income families, starting when the children were 3 years old. This book reports on the information from the preschool and kindergarten period-a period that we have found makes crucial contributions in preparing children for their later literacy achievement.

In this book we not only present the findings from this research study but also make the findings come alive by presenting examples of the types of language that were audiotaped during visits to the homes and classrooms of these children, as well as quotes from teacher and mother interviews. Furthermore, to personalize the findings of the study, we have chosen four children and their families as examples of the overall group of children being studied. These children and their families are introduced later in this chapter, and further information about their lives-at home and in preschool-appears throughout the chapters that follow.

IMPORTANCE OF LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT IN THE PRESCHOOL YEARS

As mentioned, the focus of the Home-School Study is on young children's literacy development-how children become readers and writers. When we started this study, there was considerable interest in class differences with regard to children's literacy achievement. These socioeconomic differences led many researchers to focus on children's access to information about literacy as a determinant of their success in school. It was argued that before ever getting to school, some children have lots of opportunities at home to learn letters and sounds and to learn about handling books, making lists, writing notes, and other uses of literacy. These opportunities, which are generally available to children in more middle-class homes, might explain their literacy success.

Yet other researchers noted the robust relationship between reading achievement and vocabulary and suggested that individual and social class differences in children's vocabulary development would explain their reading outcomes. Although little work had been done on precisely how children developed larger vocabularies, it was clear that, in general, children from families with higher incomes and children of more highly educated mothers did have larger vocabularies at school entry than children from low-income families. This, too, might explain differences in reading outcomes.

Though we were not rejecting either of the previous explanations, we started this study with an interest in another aspect of language skill as well. We were particularly interested in children's experience with language that replicates some of the demands of literacy-that is, talk that requires participants to develop understandings beyond the here and now and that requires the use of several utterances or turns to build a linguistic structure, such as in explanations, narratives, or pretend. We call this type of talk extended discourse, and looking for differential opportunities to develop extended discourse skill was one of the goals of this project.

Why would anyone seek the sources of success at literacy in the domains of vocabulary or extended discourse skills? Ultimately, reading is a linguistic activity. Of course, there are specifically literate facts and procedures having to do with letters and with the sounds they represent that readers need to master. Increasingly, though, evidence suggests that learning about letters and sounds presupposes knowing a lot about the internal structure of words-knowledge that is hard to acquire without first knowing a lot of words. Furthermore, even the fairly straightforward system of how letters represent sounds is simplified if children can learn and practice it by reading words that they know. This is why beginning reading texts include only simple and highly frequent words.

All too soon, however, children, including many who have a reasonable grasp of letter-sound correspondences, encounter difficulties in reading if the texts they are reading in third or fourth grade use words they are not familiar with. Furthermore, such texts may deal with topics the children know little about, making comprehension a chore. And such texts are likely to include complex grammar and to use specific linguistic cues to indicate how the information presented is organized. If children have not learned these grammatical and organizational constructions orally, they will have difficulty using them while reading. We started this project, then, with the hypothesis that young children's language learning constitutes one important early step toward success in literacy.

In 1987, when we began the data collection process, the conviction that language was a crucial precursor to literacy was based more on intuition than on evidence. More recently, though, this conviction has come to be widely shared. Whereas we have long known that children's word knowledge is closely linked to reading accomplishments (Anderson & Freebody, 1981), more recent work has shown strong relationships between children's early language skills and later reading abilities (Hart & Risley, 1995; Purcell-Gates, 1988; Walker, Greenwood, Hart, & Carta, 1994). Other studies have shown that the levels of language and literacy skills that children have in kindergarten and first grade are strong predictors of achievement many years later (Cunningham & Stanovich, 1997).

Understanding the role of language in fostering children's later literacy skills has important implications for all children, but it is of special significance for those who work with low-income families. Children growing up in these families are more likely to have difficulties with learning to read than children from middle-class families, and these gaps in performance begin to appear as early as kindergarten (Brizius & Foster, 1993; Dickinson & Snow, 1987). These early disadvantages can have serious long-term effects because children who experience reading difficulties in the middle grades are more likely than children without reading difficulties to drop out of school later in their academic careers (Barrington & Hendricks, 1989; Lloyd, 1978).

Differences in early achievement linked to parental income levels suggest that families vary in how effectively they support children's early language growth. One factor seems to be that children in families with limited incomes typically have fewer conversations with adults and are exposed to far fewer words than more advantaged children are. As a result, they tend to have smaller vocabularies than children from families with higher incomes (Hart & Risley, 1995). Also, these children tend to have fewer opportunities to hear books read aloud on a regular basis, thereby losing out on an experience known to support language...