The Impact of the 30 Million Word Gap on Teachers

The Early Catastrophe: The 30 Million Word Gap is an article examining the influence of families and specifically family income on children’s vocabulary growth. The results of the study were alarming. The researchers found that the vocabulary of the parents had a great deal of impact on the vocabulary of the children. Children from low-income families were shown to be far behind the children of higher-income families in vocabulary, thus the 30 million word gap. The study also showed that the more wealthy families were using more encouraging language with their children while the more disadvantaged families were using more discouraging language with their children.

The average family income in the community where I teach is below $30,000 per year. This article makes me wonder what this means for teachers. How can teachers try to make this gap smaller? If this disparity continues, the children we are teaching now will grow up to have families of their own and raise them with the same lack of vocabulary and encouragement. Although teachers teach vocabulary in the classroom, how much of this is sinking in and becoming permanent vocabulary in a child’s mind? There are many ways that teachers can help increase vocabulary development in young children, but there is no one solution. It seems that the most logical solution would be to create a better partnership between the parents and the classroom teacher. Helping to fill homes with reading materials would be a good first step. Teachers could encourage students to read at home with their parents, and teachers could even send home possible questions to ask students related to the stories. Creating a book bag filled with books, questions, and activities to circulate around to families would be very beneficial to families. The assumption is often that the parents in disadvantaged families do not care as much about their child’s learning, but this is not the case. In most cases it seems that parents who did not receive a good education or did not grow up in a vocabulary-rich environment just need help. Any parent who was not specifically trained in early childhood education will not know how to effectively teach their child at home. It is the teachers job to help support interactions at home that will encourage literacy learning. Parents should be given specific topics to bring up in conversations and specific games to play with their children at home. This gap will only become larger without a partnership between parents and teachers.

Source:

Hart, B., & Risley, T. R. (2003). The early catastrophe: the 30 million word gap. American Educator, 27(1), 4-9.