The Five Main Things We Do: #1 Talking With (Not Just To) Your Child

In my last post, I described the four main early literacy skills that children develop before they learn to read: oral language, phonological awareness, print concepts, and alphabet knowledge. This might sound a like a lot to teach your child, but in my house it really boils down to five main things. I'll be covering those five things in the next few posts, but to begin at the beginning:

1. Talking with (not just to) your children.  

Oral language is developed through conversations with you child. Every time you speak to your child, you are building oral language skills, even long before they are able to acknowledge your speech or respond.

For me, this started when I was pregnant. I talked to Will all the time. I would describe what I was doing and why, describe what I could see outside in the world that he could not, and talk about how much we were looking forward to meeting him. There is no evidence, that I'm aware of, that prenatal language exposure makes a difference to later literacy development (although there is some evidence that babies can recognize their parents' voices in the womb). But for me, I was trying to develop in myself the habit of talking to someone who couldn't respond -- yet. Because the more I talked to Will, the sooner I hoped he would start to respond. 

Hi Will. We are in Charleston, South Carolina.

Once children do begin to speak, you are in a position to provide them with something even more valuable than input; feedback. When Will first said, "Mama", I would say, "Yes, I am your Mama."  When he said, "I goed to the store," I said "Oh, I see, you went to the store." By affirming his efforts, letting him know I understand, and reflecting it back to him in other words, I try to expand his understanding of different ways he can communicate the same ideas.

Of course, parents talk to their children all the time. We especially issue directives ("put on your shoes"), affirmations ("good job"), and negations ("stop throwing your food"). These language interactions are necessary parts of parenthood, but they are not as productive as having real conversations with back and forth. Negations in particular tend to shut down lines of communication, so I try to limit the times I have to tell Will "no" or "stop it" (easier said than done, at two and half). Conversations allow kids to participate, receive feedback, and ensure that they understand. Back-and-forth conversations in which both adults and children have multiple turns provide children with the most opportunities for growth. Language is primarily a social skill, and is best learned through real social interactions. This is why television programs, videos, radio, or just listening to adults talk to one another do not provide as big a boost for children's language development. In fact, a recent study indicates that the background noise of having a TV on can prevent kids from hearing and participating in the language interactions that really count.

Now that Will is a bit older, I find that these back and forth interactions are often about playing along with his burgeoning imagination.  In the photo below, Will has decided that this little house on our playground is take out restaurant, where I can order anything I want. So, I order increasingly silly-sounding food: "Veal scallopini" and Will brings it out and says "Here is your veal scallopini! Is it delicious?" And I say, "It is scrumptious!" Will delights in these strange and silly-sounding words.

I'll have the salmon sashimi, please.

With Will, I've also noticed that it really helps him calm down and listen to me and participate in our conversation when I get physically down at his level to talk, eye to eye. In fact, when he is starting to get upset, he says "talk to me down here, Mommy." It's easy to sort of address him above his head, while I'm checking my e-mail on my phone or cooking dinner, but that's not really engaging him and doesn't help him build his language skills in the same way as a true one-on-one conversation.

I also try to use real grown up words and syntax, even fairly elaborate constructions, when I talk to Will. For example, one of our favorite games right now is "erroneous." I say, "The sky is green. Is that true, Will, or is that erroneous?" and he says "Erroneous!" The other day, he said, "Mommy, you are a tiger. No, that would be a erroneous."

Why Talking With Children Matters

Talking to your children helps them build knowledge of syntax, language pragmatics, and of course, vocabulary. The most famous study of this issue is the Hart and Risley's Meaningful Differences. Through home observations, they identified that children of professional parents hear almost 30 million more words over the course of their early childhood than children of less advantaged parents, and that these differences are reflected in later academic performance. 

This research has been critiqued, I think fairly, as being not culturally aware of differences among family practices and falling into the trap of blaming poor parents for the educational outcomes of their children as opposed to observing the structural factors at play. I agree with these critiques, but their work still spawned a whole line of research around language inputs, much of which confirms that early language inputs and vocabulary development are very important for children's future literacy.

There are two main reasons for this link between early vocabulary and later reading performance. The first is that vocabulary and language knowledge support later reading comprehension; it's hard to understand what you are reading if you don't know what the words mean or understand the syntax or figures of speech!

The second reason is that learning more words may help children develop phonological awareness. This theory is called the lexical restructuring hypothesis, and basically, the idea is that the more words a child knows, the more attuned he or she must be to the sounds in words in order to tell them apart. Phonological awareness is one of the most important foundational literacy skills, so this is a huge benefit. By the way, this applies to word in any language; in fact, bilingual or multilingual children often demonstrate higher levels of phonological awareness than monolingual children.

So, I hope what you will take away is that even if you never read a book to your child (which we will talk more about), you are still helping develop their future reading skills just by talking to them and with them as much as possible. In fact, my colleague and mentor Dr. Patricia Edwards developed a program for parents who cannot read themselves to help them support their children in early literacy development through conversations, stories, and songs called Talking Your Way Into Literacy. Children who are by nature quiet or shy or who begin talking late are also learning language by listening to and engaging with you. Look for opportunities to discuss, to use big and unfamiliar words, and to enjoy language together. You're already off to a great start.

Recommended reading: Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain by Dana Suskind, MD