Re: [xmca] Obama's Learn Act

[Gordon Wells <gwells@ucsc.edu>]

Mike,

Here is a brief summary of the main findings of the Bristol Study.

 Starting in 1979 I directed a large longitudinal study designed to  
chart the language development of a representative sample of children  
during the pre-school years. Subsequently, we followed the progress  
of 32 of the original 128 children until the age of 10 years,  
comparing their early language experience with their progress during  
the first phase of schooling. Several important findings emerged from  
the overall longitudinal study which challenged some beliefs that  
were then (and are still) widely accepted :

 1. Despite considerable variation in their rate of development, all  
the children followed essentially the same sequence of development  
in: the functions for which they used language; the meanings which  
they attempted to communicate; and their mastery of the morphology  
and syntax of British English.

2. There was not a statistically significant relationship between the  
children’s overall rate of development and their rating on a scale of  
family background.

 3. The most significant predictor of rate of language development  
was the quality of conversation that the children experienced.

 4. On entry to school, the quality of linguistic interaction that  
the children experienced in the classroom was inferior on all  
measures to that experienced at home; this was true for all children  
in the study, whatever their class of family background.

 5. Progress in school was significantly related to the children’s  
knowledge of literacy on entry to school and this was most strongly  
predicted by the frequency with which they had engaged in shared  
story reading; both these measures were significantly correlated with  
class of family background.

 I think it is findings 3 and 5 above that are most significant in  
the current context.

With respect to language development (3), children who developed most  
rapidly experienced more interaction with parents and older siblings,  
of which a greater proportion was of high quality in being more  
collaborative and more responsive to the children's interests. The  
Meaning Makers includes many examples that exemplify high quality  
interaction. What characterizes these examples is the way in which  
the child's mother or other interlocutor willingly responded to the  
child’s interest and provided information to explain the significance  
of what he or she was seeing or hearing, even when this interrupted  
the mother’s plan.

What these examples show, in particular, is that when the child and  
interlocutor are engaged in some joint activity of mutual interest,  
this ensures that there is intersubjectivity of attention, which  
enables the interlocutor to provide relevant information at the  
moment when the child is most able to appropriate it. It is in this  
way that the child gradually comes to take over the adult way of  
interpreting the world – not through deliberate and systematic  
instruction, but through shared interest and involvement in the  
events that make up everyday life.

Opportunities for such contingently responsive adult interaction with  
a child are obviously more difficult to provide when the adult-child  
ratio is greater than at home, but it is the goal to be aimed for. By  
contrast, talking with several children according to a predetermined  
script, based on what is expected to be assessed, is unlikely to  
secure the children's active engagement and may even lead to their  
becoming unwilling participants.

With respect to (5), these same principles applied equally to  
"literacy events." Frequency of being read to predicted facility in  
literacy learning in the early school years and overall attainment at  
age 10. But what was clear was that, for those who were most  
successful, being read to involved interaction about the story and  
accompanying illustrations, not instruction about the "mechanics" of  
the written code. If letter-sound correspondences were made explicit,  
this usually arose out of the child's interest rather than from the  
adult's didactic intentions. When children were really engaged with  
the story and the flow of the read-aloud text, they spontaneously  
began to pay attention to the vocabulary, asking questions about the  
meanings of unfamiliar words, and noticing rhymes and alliterations  
that provided opportunities to talk about letter-sound correspondences.

While being read to was more common in "middle-class" homes, it was  
not confined to such homes and children who had experiences of the  
kind just described took more easily to reading and writing in  
school, whatever their social class designation.

My interpretation of these findings is that collaborative talk about  
a text in which the child is interested is the best way to get him or  
her interested in taking over responsibility for decoding print to  
meaning and in discovering how to represent his or her own meanings  
in writing. This is particularly important for children who do not  
have such experiences at home. As I spell out in detail in The  
Meaning Makers, focusing on "phonics" before the child has discovered  
the purposes of reading and writing and the pleasure and satisfaction  
that they yield is counterproductive. Similar arguments are made by  
Marie Clay, whose successful Reading Recovery program is built around  
gaining the child's interest and active involvement in reading and  
writing texts of personal significance.

The implications of these findings for pre-school programs seem very  
clear so I will not belabor them. The question is how to get the  
policy makers to pay attention to them.

Gordon


Gordon Wells		<gwells@ucsc.edu>			http://people.ucsc.edu/~gwells/
Department of Education
University of California, Santa Cruz.





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