Lillian Marshall

A46383705

ED 801

April 30, 2018

Early Language Affecting Early Literacy

It is no doubt that language is one of the most important parts of the human experience.

In fact, McDevitt and Ormrod note that by age 6 children are capable of understanding between

8,000 and 14,000 words and hold 2,600 in their productive vocabulary (McDevitt & Ormrod,

2012). In my experience as an early childhood educator I have noticed that the children that are

the most vocal and the most confident in the classroom are children whose parents speak to them

at home, carry-on full conversations with their peers, and are active within the classroom’s

planned activities. Of course each individual child has his or her strengths, but I was curious to

see how the correlation between early language experiences can affect a child’s development in

literacy; specifically I am curious to know how a child’s early experiences affect his or her

progress in academic reading and writing. In order to get a more full understanding of how

experiences can affect development in this realm I decided to look at a couple of factors that

address pre- to intermediate-literacy skills: learning or acquiring a first language and how parent

education level affects child success later on in a child’s school career.

Acquiring language is something that all typically-developing humans undergo at some

point in times (with the occasional exception). Deb Roy, a cognitive scientist, has researched

language acquisition in depth. One of his largest experiments was with his own firstborn child.

Over the course of the study, he, with the help of his research team, compiled 90,000 hours of

video and analyzing how all of the verbal interaction led to his son’s development of speech over
the first two years of his life. He found that caregivers would shorten their utterances when

speaking to a child in order to help the child develop the context in which a word is used and its

meaning, “making the language as simple as possible” (Roy, 2011). This correlation is similar to

the correlation Dr. Anne Fernald, director of the Language Learning Lab of the Stanford

Psychology Department, reported during her TED Talk at Monterey in 2014 (Fernald, 2014). She

found that children who had language experiences where adults were speaking directly to them –

not adjacent-to or about them in the third person – developed more complex and complete

vocabularies at younger ages (Fernald, 2014). This means that the amount of time parents spend

talking to their children, the more prepared for conversation and thinking they will be.

Every child loves his or her parents. It happens several times a day that a child in my

classroom will tell me something about a parent (or other significant adult), and most of the time

they are flattering anecdotes. Children love their parents, regardless of the level of education they

may have. Of course, when a child is very young he or she may not be aware of the amount of

school mom or dad has undergone. However, this is different when a child reaches adolescence

and is able to take more agency for learning and is developing future-self goals. A study

conducted in 2009 showed that parent education level does indeed affect the future generation

(Dubow, Boxer, & Huesmann, 2009).

Parents’ educational level when the child was 8 years old significantly predicted

educational and occupational success for the child 40 years later. Structural models

showed that parental educational level had no direct effects on child educational level or

occupational prestige at age 48 but had significant indirect effects that were independent

of the other predictor variables’ effects. These indirect effects were mediated through age

19 educational aspirations and age 19 educational level. These results provide strong
 support for the unique predictive role of parental education on adult outcomes 40 years

later and underscore the developmental importance of mediators of parent education

effects such as late adolescent achievement and achievement-related aspirations (Dubow,

Boxer, & Huesmann, 2009).

When children are able to see that their parents value education, children are more likely to value

education themselves, due to the parent being a role model. Of course, if parents are not well-

equipped to help their child, which would be especially likely if the child had a speech or other

developmental delay, parents can turn to other resources, such as teachers for help.

Teachers can work with parents to provide home-based activities that parents can do with

their child at home to strengthen speaking abilities. Of course, teachers can model for parents

how to recast grammatically incorrect sentences and phrases, but this may not be accessible to all

parents, based on their native dialect. Thankfully, the American Speech-Language-Hearing

Association has a thorough list of activities to assist language development on their website

(American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, 2018). These activities are broken down by

age range in order to help facilitate appropriate activities. Activities such as “Keep helping your

child learn new words. Say a new word, and tell him what it means, or use it in a way that helps

him understand. For example, you can use the word "vehicle" instead of "car." You can say, ‘I

think I will drive the vehicle to the store. I am too tired to walk,’” help parents build their child’s

vocabulary, which can directly affect school readiness (American Speech-Language-Hearing

Association, 2018). However, there are other activities, such as “Use everyday tasks to learn

language. For example, talk about the foods on the menu and their color, texture, and taste when

in the kitchen. Talk about where to put things. Ask her to put the napkin on the table, in your lap,

or under the spoon...” and “Go grocery shopping together. Talk about what you will buy, how
many things you need, and what you will make. Talk about sizes, shapes, and weight” help

parents to learn how to facilitate conversation with their children (American Speech-Language-

Hearing Association, 2018).

In order to help children be successful in the classroom there are already levels of

intervention in place. However, most of these interventions are strictly academic. While a child

who struggles with language may see a speech pathologist and a child who struggles with

reading may see a reading interventionist or receive additional support in the classroom, not

much is done for young children in the classroom in terms of conversation. A lot of times when

it is time to learn children are expected to be quiet and show “good listening“ skills. So,

according to the research above it would be appropriate for a child who does not have a lot of

parent interaction verbally to receive a type of intervention with a teacher and it would be the

obligation of that teacher to have extended conversation throughout the day. It would be very

helpful to the child to be able to talk to an adult not only to strengthen with the bond of learning,

but also to have more advanced opportunities for speech.

Overall in my research I was both pleased and displeased. I was pleased at the amount of

content to be found on student success, student success affected by parents, and language

acquisition. I dug deep, but could not find much substantial evidence to tie language and literacy

together, other than the suggestion that a child needs to have control over language to be

successful in school, which has been addressed in this class. It seems to me that the beginnings

of correlation are there, but more research needs to be done to substantiate and reinforce the

claim on which I propose the thesis of this paper: language development and home experiences

are tied to a child’s success as a literacy learner. This means that I, as well as my colleagues in
academia and in classrooms, will have to navigate the variables of human existence and further

parse out what is and is not relevant to the development of strong literacy.

.
References

Activities to Encourage Speech and Language Development. (n.d.). In American Speech-

Language-Hearing Association. Retrieved April 29, 2018, from

https://www.asha.org/public/speech/development/Parent-Stim-Activities.htm

Dubow, E. F., Boxer, P., & Huesmann, L. R. (2009). Long-term Effects of Parents’ Education on

Children’s Educational and Occupational Success: Mediation by Family Interactions, Child

Aggression, and Teenage Aspirations. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly (Wayne State University.

Press), 55(3), 224–249. http://doi.org/10.1353/mpq.0.0030

Fernald, A. (Writer). (2014). Why talking to little kids matters [Online video]. Retrieved from

YouTube.

McDevitt, T. & Ormrod, J. (2012). Child development and education (5th ed.). New York:

Pearson.

Roy, D. (Writer). (2011). The birth of a word | TED Talk [Online video]. Retrieved April 29,

2018, from YouTube.