Dr. Johnson was kind enough to send me a new book so I am back on track with chapter summaries. This chapter discusses changes that must occur before school starts, during ages 0-4. A chapter on early childhood education may seem out of place, more appropriate for a textbook on parenting or child development. But if you consider that "by some estimates, 98 percent of education spending occurs after the basic intellectual capacities of children have been mostly determined", I think you will agree that this subject is very relevant. And what is most relevant at this stage of a child's development is "language dancing", where the parents are "engaged face to face with the infant and speak in a fully adult, sophisticated, chatty language-as if the infant were listening, comprehending and fully responding to the comments..It is deliberate, uncompromised, personal adult conversation...It is talking about 'what ifs,' 'do you remember,' shouldn't you,' wouldn't it be better if,' and so on. These often take the form of questions that invite infants to think deeply about what is happening around them. Language dancing entails chattiness, thinking aloud, and commenting on what the child is doing and on what the parent is doing and planning...Other scholars have shown that the most powerful factor influencing reading skills is auditory processing skill-the very skill that is honed as infants listen to parents speak to them in sophisticated, adult language." Furthermore, the children whose parents did not speak seriously to their children until their children could speak, at roughly 12 months, suffered persistent deficit in intellectual capacity, compared to those whose parents ere talkative from the beginning. (By some estimates, by age 36 months, children of talkative parents had heard 48 million words)
This is based on the research of Todd Risley and Betty Hart http://www.childrenofthecode.org/interviews/pdfs/Risley.pdf
According to them, "80 percent of the variation in public school performance results from family effects such as those summarized above, not school effects." Most importantly, their findings indicated that "the level of income, ethnicity, and level of parents' education had no explanatory power in determining the level of cognitive capacity that the children achieved. It is all explained by the amount of language dancing that the parents engaged in."
"By age 4, the best can be expected from education or intervention programs is to keep less advantaged children from falling further behind."
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