talking with children the road to literacy dr. carole peterson beulah jesso memorial university...

Talking with Children

The Road to Literacy

Dr. Carole PetersonBeulah JessoMemorial University

Funded by CLLRNet & NSERC

Talking with Children - The Path to Literacy 2

Introduction

• Reading is a complex task, with many contributors

• My lab focuses on some discourse skills that underlie literacy

• Specifically: narrative skills– Autobiographical stories about one’s life

experiences


Why did we choose narratives?

• Children can begin telling them by age 2

• Omnipresent in human societies

• Even non-literate parents can engage their children in narration


Properties of narratives

• Extended discourse

• Decontextualized

• Sentences must be cohesive

• Causal & temporal connections

• Overall structural coherence

• Evaluation


Narratives and literacy

• Narrative properties similar to properties of texts children will be reading

• Children with good narrative skills have an important foundation upon which literacy can be overlaid


A tale of 3 stories


Crucial Question: Why are these stories so different?

• These differences often correlated with social class

• But social class is NOT the underlying cause.

• Rather, related to properties of the environment


Linguistic home environments

• Hart & Risley study– Visited families at home monthly for 2½ years– Children 1 - 3 years old– Over 30,000 pages of transcripts– Included welfare, working class, &

professional families


Differences between families

• Number of words spoken to child by parents

• Differences were stunning


What does this mean?

• Some children hear 2500 fewer words per hour.

• Extrapolating, some children have heard 32 million fewer words by kindergarten.


Relationship between number of words & child outcomes

• Differences in words spoken to children was tightly linked to language differences in child outcomes.

• The more parents talked to their children, the faster the child’s vocabulary growth.

• The more parents talked to their children, the higher their child’s verbal IQ test scores years later.


Relationship to socioeconomic factors

• Lots of variation within each social class.

• These variations were what mattered, not the family’s economic circumstances.

• Unfortunately, low income families most likely to be at low end of variation.

• Typically, a child in a low-income home heard only 3 million words/year, vs. 11 million words/year in professional families.


More than just word frequency is important

• Two types of language– Language directed toward care & socialization– Extended talk


Care & Socialization

behaviour management

imperatives prohibitions

Extended Talkpast events

properties of objects & events

feelings

explanations

future plans


Style of extended talk was automatically different

• More varied vocabulary

• Descriptions of objects & events richer in nuances

• Causal & temporal connections made

• Events related to feelings

• Parental talk more positive in tone

• Parental talk more responsive to child’s talk


Important finding

• Families did not differ in amount of ‘business talk’ (care & socialization)

• Huge differences in amount of extended talk.


Sentence Complexity

• Number of nouns, modifiers, & past-tense verbs per

utterance


Relationship between measures of extended talk &

child measures• Greater vocabulary use at age 3

• Higher verbal IQ at age 3

• Better scores on language development tests at age 9-10 (correlation = .70)


Narrative skills & literacy

• Narratives are an important form of extended talk

• They have many properties important to literacy

• Children with poor narrative skills more likely to be labeled ‘learning disabled’ in school


How do narratives replicate the demands of literacy?

• Go beyond the here-and-now• Must decontextualize language (eg, describe the

there-and-then)• Require several utterances or turns to build a

linguistic structure• Use linguistic cues to indicate organization of

information• Use more complex grammar• Use a larger vocabulary


Research at Memorial

• Collaborators: Beulah Jesso, Allyssa McCabe (U. Mass.)

• Want to find a way to encourage extended talk in families.

• Specifically, personal experience narratives.


Telling Their Life Adventures

Children learn to tell personal experience

narratives


Experimental research

• Do parental differences in style actually CAUSE differences in child narrative skill?

• Experimental study:– Low income parents– Intervention & control group– Taught intervention parents the principles of

elaborative, topic-extending style


Results: Context-setting information

pre-test post-test follow-up

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

Control

Intervention


Results: Total information

pre-test post-test follow-up0

40

80

120

160

Control

Intervention


Conclusions from experimental research

• Parental narrative-eliciting styles indeed cause differences in child skill

• Parental narrative style is crucial• Parents can be taught how to become

more elaborative• Teaching parents good narrative-eliciting

style leads to gains in relevant child skills


Current research project

• The prior study was very small

• Training in elaborative conversational techniques took place individually

• Current study is large

• Training takes place in groups

• Funded by CLLRNet

• Collaborators: Allyssa McCabe (U. Mass. at Lowell) & Anne McKeough (U. Calgary),


Method

• Low income families• Recruited from preschools• Randomly assigned to 2 groups

– Intervention– Craft activity


Craft group

• Moms & children met weekly for 4 weeks

• 1 ½ - 2 hours per week

• Engaged in simple crafts that parent & child could do together

• Crafts used materials readily available at no cost


Intervention group

• Moms & children met weekly for 4 weeks• 1 ½ - 2 hours per week• Explained the importance of narratives for

school readiness


Parental concerns

• “But we never do anything or go anywhere”

• “We have nothing to talk about”


Intervention

• Watched videos of elaborative vs. topic-switching parent-child interactions

• Parents invited to evaluate & compare styles

• Role played elaborative style of interaction with each other & group leader

• Recorded their home conversations with children

• Played these for discussion & feedback


Principle 1

• Find the time to talk to your child one on one.


Principle 2

• Talk to your child about things that happened in the past. Do this over and over.


Principle 3

• Spend lots of time talking about each event.


Principle 4

• Help your child build a story with a beginning, middle and end.


Principle 5

• Ask “Wh” questions like who was there, what happened, where was this, when did that happen?


Principle 6

• Listen closely to what your child says, and help them say more by asking them to say more. Encourage them to keep talking.


Principle 7

• Help your child say more than one thing at a time. Say things like “really?” “yeah?” and “and?”


Principle 8

• 8. Talk about the things your child wants to talk about.


Follow-up phone calls

• For 6 months following group meetings:

• Parents called bi-monthly

• Discuss principles– Which have parents used– How well they are working– Provide additional help as requested


Our expected results

• Will follow children through first few years of school

• Expect intervention children to be significantly better at language skills

• Better vocabularies

• Better narratives

• Better reading skills


Strengths

• Doesn’t depend on parents having good reading skills

• Empowers parents who themselves have poor literacy skills

• Doesn’t involve expensive resources


Possible tangential effects

• Huebner taught parents to interact more constructively with preschoolers during book-reading

• Parents reported decreased parenting stress in follow-ups


Our parents – pretest data

• Parents highly stressed– At 81st percentile on Parenting Stress Index

• (= borderline clinical significance)

– Parents rate children as more difficult than average (Difficult child subscale)

• Parent-child attachment mostly insecure


Implications

• Professionals who deal with high-risk families

• Teachers in preschools

• Community centres

• School outreach programs


Long-term goals

• Develop a program that is easy to use & easy to deliver

• Can be readily used in a range of situations

• Can be used inexpensively in group settings

talking with children the road to literacy dr. carole peterson beulah jesso memorial university...

Documents

properties of texts

fewer words

familiesnumber of words

social classbut social

low income families

lowincome home

good narrative skills

childs vocabulary growth