Starting early literacy with baby talk is too late!

Tom Sticht - 8.10.09
Columnist EducationNews.org
International Consultant in Adult Education

On Wednesday, July 29, 2009, an article with the headline “Early literacy begins with baby talk” was published in Canada on the National Post web site (http://www.nationalpost.com/story.html?id=1840847).

The article focuses on the well established connection between oral language and written language. Children who develop high levels of oral language vocabulary and the ability to express and comprehend ideas in oral language early in life before school tend to become the better readers after they enter into school and acquire written language decoding skills.

The recent National Early Literacy Panel (NELP) report (online at

www.nifl.gov) supported this relationship between oral and written language and looked at how well various measures of literacy (e.g., alphabet knowledge, etc. and measures of oral language, including oral vocabulary and listening comprehension) predicted reading achievement when children entered school. The authors concluded that along with other variables, "...more complex aspects of oral language, such as grammar, definitional vocabulary, and listening comprehension, had more substantial predictive relations with later conventional literacy skills" p. 79. In these analyses, listening comprehension of preschool children tended to correlate mildly with their reading comprehension in kindergarten, first grade, or second grade.

The National Post article gives a number of suggestions for parents if they want to stimulate oral language and prepare children for greater literacy achievement in school. This includes ideas like engaging in lots of language play, such as rhyming games, talking with and listening to your child, and so forth (see also the Publications page of the National Institute for Literacy reports for early literacy learning-www.nifl.gov).

These are good ideas but they reveal a troubling drawback to the argument that literacy begins with baby talk.

Actually, literacy begins with parent talk. That is, the ability of parents to speak well, use a wide vocabulary, discuss a lot of different concepts and ideas, and relate their speech to children’s responses is the basis for baby talk. But as the National Post article points out, research by Betty Hart and Todd Risley has indicated that parents from poverty backgrounds are frequently unprepared to carry out the type and extent of oral language interaction with their children as are more highly educated, professional parents.

This means that there needs to be widely available programs of adult language and literacy education that can improve both the oral and written language skills of many undereducated, poorly literate youth, parents or adults who may become parents. These programs can be effective in affecting the later literacy achievement of even those babies that have not yet been conceived.

Because of the importance of adult language and literacy education in promoting the intergenerational transfer of skills from parents to their children, education policy needs to be focused not just on one child’s life cycle, but on the life cycles of both adults and their children.

A "Multiple Life Cycles" policy for education explicitly recognizes that educational policies do not affect only one generation but through the intergenerational transfer of motivation, language, and literacy they affect many cycles of lives across generations. For this reason governments need to invest in adult literacy and lifelong education with the understanding that this investment will not only provide returns in terms of increased productivity, health, and civic participation on the part of the adults, but also with the understanding that the investment in the education of adults may also produce returns in the increased educability of the adult’s children. Good adult education in parenting is the backbone of good preschool education.

Today we have a better understanding that poorly educated children are the source of adult functional illiteracy, and functionally illiterate adults are the source of poorly educated children. The hope is that through education based on a Multiple Life Cycles policy, in which children are guaranteed a right to educated parents, the vicious intergenerational cycles of functional illiteracy can be stopped.

Waiting for children to be born is too late. The real head start for children starts with the heads of their parents!

tsticht@aznet.net