May/June
2008
School and community programs help parents
build children's literacy from birth
by Laura Pappano
School matters, but literacy starts at home. Teachers
armed with reading contracts and carefully worded missives have
long urged parents to read aloud to their children. But now there
is a second and perhaps more powerful message: Talk to your kids,
too.
Mounting research that links language-rich home
environments with reading success and school achievement is driving
educators and community groups to target families long before children
register for school. In addition to Todd Risley and Betty Hart’s
landmark
work correlating verbal home environments with future literacy,
Catherine
E. Snow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and David
K. Dickinson, a professor of teaching and learning at Vanderbilt
University’s Peabody College, are assembling data on the impact
of early literacy interventions. Their ongoing
study of 57 low-income families reveals that home support for
literacy markedly influences kindergarten language skills and fourth
grade reading comprehension test scores. No wonder those at the
leading edge of literacy want to increase the quantity and quality
of conversations between parents and children beginning at birth.
“It is really what parents have been doing
at home that children have to draw on when they become readers and
writers,” says Gail Jordan, associate professor of education
at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minn., who says children from
three to five are “ripe” for engaging in rich language
learning.
A decade ago, Jordan created Project
EASE (Early Access to Success in Education) to help parents
and kindergarten teachers work shoulder to shoulder to help children
develop literacy skills. The program, now used in 120 Ohio schools
and in Minnesota, invites parents and children to participate in
structured evening events that provide education and modeling for
parents and offer weekly activities to do at home. Parent-child
activities include storybook reading, retelling family narratives,
and talking about the world. Retelling family stories, for example,
reinforces the sequencing of ideas, emphasizes the value of detail,
and sharpens children’s narrative skills.
Such approaches are making a difference. A 2000
study that tracked 148 kindergarten students and their families
in the White Bear Lake School District in Minnesota (with 77 receiving
the intervention and 71 acting as a control group), showed that
Project EASE students made significantly greater gains in language
skills than the control group. The Collaborative
Language and Literacy Instruction Project, created by Daniel
Pallante of the Ohio Education Development
Center, also uses Project EASE with teachers and parents in
Ohio with similar results. An outside evaluation showed that students
who attended more of the Project EASE literacy nights with their
parents and did more of the take-home activities tended to perform
better on kindergarten reading tests.
More recently, Jordan has applied this approach
to preschools, creating a program called Building Language Together,
now used in 32 preschools in Minnesota. (It is offered in both English
and Spanish.) The program includes books that go home with parents
and “book scripts” that take parents through each story
page by page to prompt parent-child discussions.
“The best talk around a story book,”
says Nonie
Lesaux, associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of
Education, takes the story as “a point of departure.”
Exploratory, investigative discussions that evolve between parents
and children, Lesaux says, are central to higher-level literacy
learning. “One of the hallmarks of kids who have a good vocabulary
is that they can talk about things that are not in the present,”
she adds.
Jordan notes that the social-emotional bond parents
have with children amplifies learning. Parents, she says, can tailor
explanations to click perfectly (as when a mom explains “variety”
to a daughter with a sweet tooth by naming types of candy). They
can also provide more extensive opportunities for rich discussion
than a teacher attending to a class of 25 children.
“Let’s Talk”—In Any Language
The Let’s Talk—It Makes a Difference
campaign, started five years ago by the Agenda
for Children in Cambridge, Mass., focuses on helping low-income
and non-native English speaking families see the value of conversation
in fostering literacy. The campaign, targeting children from birth
to age 8, has staffers meet new mothers in maternity wards, make
home visits, and hold “talk workshops” and “reading
parties” to support parents in their teaching role.
“Parents want to do best by their children,”
says Lauren Leikin, literacy coordinator for the Agenda for Children,
which is sponsored by the Cambridge
Public Schools and various local health and community agencies.
“But the talking and reading don’t come as naturally
to some parents as to others.” For instance, she says, cultural
factors can influence how much parents solicit conversation and
ideas from children. In some cultures, standards of good behavior
discourage children from speaking up. A “major emphasis”
of their work, Leikin says, is encouraging parents to engage children
verbally—and in their native language (see The
Home Language Advantage). The program has trained home
visitors who speak Haitian Creole, Bengali, Amharic, Spanish, and
Portuguese in addition to English.
For Karina Gildea, a mother of two young daughters,
the home visit from Let’s Talk staffer Gretta Hardina is a
welcome break. Born and raised in Mexico, Gildea speaks fluent Spanish
and good—but not perfect—English. But as someone who
attends parent-child play programs and library story sessions, Gildea
know her children’s success begins with her.
“I try to talk to her when I am changing
her diaper so that she can start understanding,” Gildea says
of her four-month-old baby, dressed in fuzzy white pajamas with
a baby duck on the front. Her two-year-old, who has long dark hair
and wears a bright red plastic watch on her left wrist, alternately
sits by her side and scampers back and forth to the far reaches
of the second-floor apartment. Her request for “TV! TV!”
fades as Hardina unpacks board books from her canvas bag. The books
are meant for the infant, but it is the two-year-old who clambers
onto the sofa and reaches across her mother’s lap toward Hardina
for one after another.
In a typical visit, Hardina may model how to read
aloud interactively, using the book as a launching point for dialogue
and asking open-ended questions. She also offers guidance about
the stages of reading and “normal” child behavior, she
says, “like chewing books, grabbing the book, and turning
the pages quickly.”
It may seem obvious to educators that reading—and
talking—to children from birth can influence school success,
but Leikin says survey data gathered from program participants reveals
that this is a new message for many parents. For example, only 26
percent of 75 parents reported being “very aware” of
the importance of talking to children before attending a “Talk
Workshop.” Afterwards, 96 percent “definitely”
planned to use the skills they’d learned. Similarly, a follow-up
phone survey in 2007 with 33 parents who received home visits found
that 70 percent had changed the way they spoke to their children
as a result of information they learned during the visit.
“Everybody can talk with their kids, and
it makes an enormous difference in their children’s lifelong
academic success,” says Leikin.
Laura Pappano is an education writer and writer-in-residence
at Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College.
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