30 Million Words

We had a lovely day last Monday.  Worked excitedly on all sorts of new words: yank, topple, wince, wide grin, heartwarming, corduroy, infant, sum, addend, process, cobble, shards, pulverize, currents, grains, weathering.  Read them in context, discussed them out of context, acted them out, placed them in new contexts, shared personal experiences that related to them, spoke with them, wrote with them, jumped up and down to them, clapped their syllables out.  Yank, topple, wince, wide grin, heartwarming, corduroy, infant, sum, addend, process, cobble, shards, pulverize, currents, grains, weathering. Yeah!

That’s a whole lot of new vocabulary for a seven year-old, especially seven year-olds who are not native English speakers, BUT it barely makes a nick on the vast surface of the English language, let alone its depths.

There is a well known and often cited study of 42 Kansas families over 3 years that showed that by age 3 children of professional parents hear 30 million words more than children of welfare parents. Where welfare is code for poor and educationally-disadvantaged.

It’s not that there are THAT many words in the English language.  The 2nd edition of the Oxford English Dictionary has 171,476 words in active use and another 47,156 obsolete ones (useful, in future college-prep education, for reading Shakespeare).  If you include different senses of words–to yank, for example, is to pull, but a Yank is, of course, also an abbrievation for Yankee which is an old-time New Englander, the winners of the Civil War, a New York sports team member, and an American generally speaking–(try teaching all those meanings to seven year-olds from Central America!)–the number of English words in usage jumps to about 750,000.

Children learn words best through repetition and being exposed to words in context and then being given opportunities to use them.  When parents talk to children, from infancy on, even when the children are not yet consumers or producers of language (infans–from Latin, in, not, + fans, speaking), vocabulary building is what gets done. When they listen and converse with their children, langauge is being reinforced.

In my classes over the years, the few children who have come from professional families have had far more access to the English language than other students.  They may not spell well or write well or do math well, but they know more words, way more words.  And they know how to produce and consume words in service of their needs.

There are also always a few kids from non-professional families who have excellent background knowledge of English words.  They are almost always voracious readers.

The majority of my students, however, come from poor, educationally-disadvantaged families.  They’re mostly NOT on welfare (though free lunches are one form of welfare–more on that one some other day), but they are very poor.  Families of four or five surviving on less than $18,000/year in a high cost of living city like Los Angeles (I see their applications for free lunches). Their parents may have finished sixth grade in their home countries (I see the notes they write me).

It’s my job to teach them words, and, equally importantly, strategies for learning and making educated guesses about words they don’t already know.  Using cognates from Spanish, using the words around the unknown word, using pictures, looking at words like legos with separable, meaning-laden prefixes and suffixes and root words.  I do this all day long.  I repeat the words all day long.  I create assignments to help them repeat and use and reuse the words.  Studies have shown that the more complex the cognition with with words, the more likely you are to remember them.  All this in the 6 hours/day they’re with me.  What about the remaining, say, 7 hours when they’re elsewhere–at aftercare or at home?

How many English words do they hear at home?  Almost none.

How many Spanish words–or, for that matter, words in any language?  On the order of the welfare set of parents in the Kansas study.

The majority of the children I teach get almost no exposure to English outside of the school day.  Their parents, grandparents, and peers speak to them in Spanish.  Even during the school day, at recess and lunch, their peers and the adult playground supervisors revert to Spanish.

I’m not one of those ENGLISH ONLY! zealots floating around in the American political sphere.  I speak Spanish, and I use it in my classroom daily to help children understand, to see cognates, to see differences in grammar and syntax.  I also use it regularly to communicate with parents.

BUT.  I know that the students who speak English at home are exposed to many more words.  I know that immersion helps you learn a language faster simply because you hear it and practice it more.

Language is first and foremost a means to an end.  You use it to get something done: tell someone what you need, ask someone for information, express your emotions (as we tell little ones:  use your words!).  If you really need to communicate something, you will find a way to cobble the bits and pieces you have to make meaning.  The brains stretches and grows in this process.  Words used are words retained.  Ditto on syntax.

I know the majority of the students who arrive in my class in 2nd or 3rd grade with little or no previous English instruction are behind their peers (from the same cultural and socio-economic background) who have been in English since pre-K, Day 1.

The studies that show that children ought to be scaffolded into English by first being taught in Spanish don’t take into account one major issue: the Spanish-speaking students that most urban and rural US school districts are serving don’t come to us from parents who are speaking thousands of Spanish words a day to their children.  They’re coming from homes where language is not used that much, be it English, Spanish, Zapotec, Mixtec, whatever.  They’re part of that 30 million word gap.  In Spanish and English.

The Kansas study showed that the 30 million word gap carried through in later years.  The students with greater early childhood exposure to words performed significantly better in language tests at the ages of 9-10.

I can jump up and down with my students to the rhythm and sense of pulverize for hours (Johnny Rotten screeching in the background), but that will never overcome the Language Gap.  It can, at best, begin to bridge it.  To really address it, school reform needs to take on the home.

Now tell me: how many of our vocabulary words can you recall?