This article extends Lemieux’s concern for the interdisciplinary tension between philosophy and s... more This article extends Lemieux’s concern for the interdisciplinary tension between philosophy and sociology to the intradisciplinary tension within psychology between approaches to the study of children focusing on universal principles and approaches adopting a contextual lens. This tension arises both in how development is defined and in the methods chosen for its study. This tension is exemplified in terms of the recent American preoccupation with the Word Gap (WG), a supposed difference of 30 million words heard by socioeconomically diverse children by the age of 4 that is blamed for educational disparities throughout the school years. The article discusses the political implications of WG discourse as it gives rise to the erasure of language practices of diverse Americans and obscures the role that the educational system plays in fostering a ‘one-size-fits-all’ instructional model. The article concludes with a discussion of attempts to combat the deficit model that the WG discours...
Amid growing controversy about the oft-cited "30-million-word gap," this investigation ... more Amid growing controversy about the oft-cited "30-million-word gap," this investigation uses language data from five American communities across the socioeconomic spectrum to test, for the first time, Hart and Risley's (1995) claim that poor children hear 30 million fewer words than their middle-class counterparts during the early years of life. The five studies combined ethnographic fieldwork with longitudinal home observations of 42 children (18-48 months) interacting with family members in everyday life contexts. Results do not support Hart and Risley's claim, reveal substantial variation in vocabulary environments within each socioeconomic stratum, and suggest that definitions of verbal environments that exclude multiple caregivers and bystander talk disproportionately underestimate the number of words to which low-income children are exposed.
In this article we explore the ways in which three young children from a non-mainstream cultural ... more In this article we explore the ways in which three young children from a non-mainstream cultural group created stories with the assistance of their caregivers and siblings in the social contexts of their homes. We assert that these children’s oral narrations show us important dimensions of early experience with decontextualized content as practiced in their families that may offer suggestions for analysis of culturally sensitive experiences with literacy for all children. The dimensions we highlight are the tangibility of the elements around which the story is created, the interlocutor support children receive for beginning and continuing their stories, and the interaction between the storytelling process and the child’s self-interest. These three dimensions illustrate how children “enter” into stories and storytelling and broaden our understanding for fostering culturally sustaining pedagogy within schools.
For many educators, scholars, and policy makers alike, one of the most commonly cited reasons tha... more For many educators, scholars, and policy makers alike, one of the most commonly cited reasons that poor and working-class children fail at school is due to differences between the language within these children's homes and the language within the school. Unfortunately, these differences are often conceptualized as language deficits or language impoverishment in the homes of non-majority families rather than as differences between two distinct, but equally viable systems, one of which possesses political hegemony over the other. In particular, recent discussions of language deficit have centered around the notion of the Word Gap, a finding that Hart and Risley (1995) extrapolated from their research on 42 families from Midwestern communities suggesting that children from impoverished homes hear 30 million fewer words than children from professional homes by the time they reach four years of age. Alongside these dire findings and predictions exists another tradition in scholarship on language development whose central premise is that most children grow up to be fully competent speakers within their cultural contexts. This tradition known as language socialization is an approach to language study that examines how language use among young children is socialized by caregivers, and how language is used by caregivers to inculcate into their children the beliefs, values, and norms of their culture and its practices. Questions of language deprivation are essentially moot within this tradition because language is always defined as emerging from within the contexts in which its speakers live, work, and play. In this way the mismatch between the language of the home and the language of the school is redefined as a problem of language contact x TABLE OF CONTENTS
New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, 1995
Conversational narration offers an opportunity for young children to display both static and dyna... more Conversational narration offers an opportunity for young children to display both static and dynamic concepts of self.
This ethnographic study of 8 African American toddlers and their families focused on the children... more This ethnographic study of 8 African American toddlers and their families focused on the children's productive competence with regard to various types of naturally occurring narrativelike conversation. The notion of the emergence of narrative competence is examined, and a definition is posited which incorporates minimal requirements for child participation within the fundamental essence of narrative structure. Developmental evidence is used to argue for an order of emergence between fictional and temporal event production, which bears on Nelson's Generalized Event Representation (GER) account of cognitive processing. Qualitative interpretations of the quantitatively derived patterns illustrate the merits of combining both approaches in data analysis. Finally, the creation of a socioculturally sensitive account underscores the importance for theory construction of pursuing research from a comparative, cross-cultural perspective.
This article extends Lemieux’s concern for the interdisciplinary tension between philosophy and s... more This article extends Lemieux’s concern for the interdisciplinary tension between philosophy and sociology to the intradisciplinary tension within psychology between approaches to the study of children focusing on universal principles and approaches adopting a contextual lens. This tension arises both in how development is defined and in the methods chosen for its study. This tension is exemplified in terms of the recent American preoccupation with the Word Gap (WG), a supposed difference of 30 million words heard by socioeconomically diverse children by the age of 4 that is blamed for educational disparities throughout the school years. The article discusses the political implications of WG discourse as it gives rise to the erasure of language practices of diverse Americans and obscures the role that the educational system plays in fostering a ‘one-size-fits-all’ instructional model. The article concludes with a discussion of attempts to combat the deficit model that the WG discours...
Amid growing controversy about the oft-cited "30-million-word gap," this investigation ... more Amid growing controversy about the oft-cited "30-million-word gap," this investigation uses language data from five American communities across the socioeconomic spectrum to test, for the first time, Hart and Risley's (1995) claim that poor children hear 30 million fewer words than their middle-class counterparts during the early years of life. The five studies combined ethnographic fieldwork with longitudinal home observations of 42 children (18-48 months) interacting with family members in everyday life contexts. Results do not support Hart and Risley's claim, reveal substantial variation in vocabulary environments within each socioeconomic stratum, and suggest that definitions of verbal environments that exclude multiple caregivers and bystander talk disproportionately underestimate the number of words to which low-income children are exposed.
In this article we explore the ways in which three young children from a non-mainstream cultural ... more In this article we explore the ways in which three young children from a non-mainstream cultural group created stories with the assistance of their caregivers and siblings in the social contexts of their homes. We assert that these children’s oral narrations show us important dimensions of early experience with decontextualized content as practiced in their families that may offer suggestions for analysis of culturally sensitive experiences with literacy for all children. The dimensions we highlight are the tangibility of the elements around which the story is created, the interlocutor support children receive for beginning and continuing their stories, and the interaction between the storytelling process and the child’s self-interest. These three dimensions illustrate how children “enter” into stories and storytelling and broaden our understanding for fostering culturally sustaining pedagogy within schools.
For many educators, scholars, and policy makers alike, one of the most commonly cited reasons tha... more For many educators, scholars, and policy makers alike, one of the most commonly cited reasons that poor and working-class children fail at school is due to differences between the language within these children's homes and the language within the school. Unfortunately, these differences are often conceptualized as language deficits or language impoverishment in the homes of non-majority families rather than as differences between two distinct, but equally viable systems, one of which possesses political hegemony over the other. In particular, recent discussions of language deficit have centered around the notion of the Word Gap, a finding that Hart and Risley (1995) extrapolated from their research on 42 families from Midwestern communities suggesting that children from impoverished homes hear 30 million fewer words than children from professional homes by the time they reach four years of age. Alongside these dire findings and predictions exists another tradition in scholarship on language development whose central premise is that most children grow up to be fully competent speakers within their cultural contexts. This tradition known as language socialization is an approach to language study that examines how language use among young children is socialized by caregivers, and how language is used by caregivers to inculcate into their children the beliefs, values, and norms of their culture and its practices. Questions of language deprivation are essentially moot within this tradition because language is always defined as emerging from within the contexts in which its speakers live, work, and play. In this way the mismatch between the language of the home and the language of the school is redefined as a problem of language contact x TABLE OF CONTENTS
New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, 1995
Conversational narration offers an opportunity for young children to display both static and dyna... more Conversational narration offers an opportunity for young children to display both static and dynamic concepts of self.
This ethnographic study of 8 African American toddlers and their families focused on the children... more This ethnographic study of 8 African American toddlers and their families focused on the children's productive competence with regard to various types of naturally occurring narrativelike conversation. The notion of the emergence of narrative competence is examined, and a definition is posited which incorporates minimal requirements for child participation within the fundamental essence of narrative structure. Developmental evidence is used to argue for an order of emergence between fictional and temporal event production, which bears on Nelson's Generalized Event Representation (GER) account of cognitive processing. Qualitative interpretations of the quantitatively derived patterns illustrate the merits of combining both approaches in data analysis. Finally, the creation of a socioculturally sensitive account underscores the importance for theory construction of pursuing research from a comparative, cross-cultural perspective.
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