Talking with Children: The Path to Literacy

1. Talking with Children The Road to Literacy Dr. Carole PetersonBeulah JessoMemorial University Funded by CLLRNet & NSERC

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 Talking with Children - The Path to Literacy

3. 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 Talking with Children - The Path to Literacy

4. Properties of narratives • Extended discourse • Decontextualized • Sentences must be cohesive • Causal & temporal connections • Overall structural coherence • Evaluation Talking with Children - The Path to Literacy

5. 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 Talking with Children - The Path to Literacy

6. A tale of 3 stories Talking with Children - The Path to Literacy

7. 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 Talking with Children - The Path to Literacy

8. 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 Talking with Children - The Path to Literacy

9. Differences between families • Number of words spoken to child by parents • Differences were stunning Talking with Children - The Path to Literacy

10. What does this mean? • Some children hear 2500 fewer words per hour. • Extrapolating, some children have heard 32 million fewer words by kindergarten. Talking with Children - The Path to Literacy

11. 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. Talking with Children - The Path to Literacy

12. 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. Talking with Children - The Path to Literacy

13. More than just word frequency is important • Two types of language • Language directed toward care & socialization • Extended talk Talking with Children - The Path to Literacy

14. future plans explanations feelings properties of objects & events past events behaviour management imperatives prohibitions Extended Talk Care & Socialization Talking with Children - The Path to Literacy

15. 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 Talking with Children - The Path to Literacy

16. Important finding • Families did not differ in amount of ‘business talk’ (care & socialization) • Huge differences in amount of extended talk. Talking with Children - The Path to Literacy

17. Sentence Complexity • Number of nouns, modifiers, & past-tense verbs per utterance Talking with Children - The Path to Literacy

18. 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) Talking with Children - The Path to Literacy

19. 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 Talking with Children - The Path to Literacy

20. 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 Talking with Children - The Path to Literacy

21. 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. Talking with Children - The Path to Literacy

22. Children learn to tell personal experience narratives Telling Their Life Adventures Talking with Children - The Path to Literacy

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25. 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 Talking with Children - The Path to Literacy

26. 30 25 Intervention 20 Control 15 10 5 0 pre-test post-test follow-up Results: Context-setting information Talking with Children - The Path to Literacy

27. 160 Intervention 120 Control 80 40 0 pre-test post-test follow-up Results: Total information Talking with Children - The Path to Literacy

28. 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 Talking with Children - The Path to Literacy

29. 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), Talking with Children - The Path to Literacy

30. Method • Low income families • Recruited from preschools • Randomly assigned to 2 groups • Intervention • Craft activity Talking with Children - The Path to Literacy

31. 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 Talking with Children - The Path to Literacy

32. Intervention group • Moms & children met weekly for 4 weeks • 1 ½ - 2 hours per week • Explained the importance of narratives for school readiness Talking with Children - The Path to Literacy

33. Parental concerns • “But we never do anything or go anywhere” • “We have nothing to talk about” Talking with Children - The Path to Literacy

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37. 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 Talking with Children - The Path to Literacy

38. Principle 1 • Find the time to talk to your child one on one. Talking with Children - The Path to Literacy

39. Principle 2 • Talk to your child about things that happened in the past. Do this over and over. Talking with Children - The Path to Literacy

40. Principle 3 • Spend lots of time talking about each event. Talking with Children - The Path to Literacy

41. Principle 4 • Help your child build a story with a beginning, middle and end. Talking with Children - The Path to Literacy

42. Principle 5 • Ask “Wh” questions like who was there, what happened, where was this, when did that happen? Talking with Children - The Path to Literacy

43. 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. Talking with Children - The Path to Literacy

44. Principle 7 • Help your child say more than one thing at a time. Say things like “really?” “yeah?” and “and?” Talking with Children - The Path to Literacy

45. Principle 8 • 8. Talk about the things your child wants to talk about. Talking with Children - The Path to Literacy

46. 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 Talking with Children - The Path to Literacy

47. 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 Talking with Children - The Path to Literacy

48. Strengths • Doesn’t depend on parents having good reading skills • Empowers parents who themselves have poor literacy skills • Doesn’t involve expensive resources Talking with Children - The Path to Literacy

49. Possible tangential effects • Huebner taught parents to interact more constructively with preschoolers during book-reading • Parents reported decreased parenting stress in follow-ups Talking with Children - The Path to Literacy

50. 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 Talking with Children - The Path to Literacy