Lisa Guernsey
Senior Director, Birth to 12th Grade Policy; Co-Founder and Director, Learning Sciences Exchange
Infants, Toddlers and Precursors to Literacy
Babies and reading: It may sound ridiculous to put these two words in the same sentence. But as new studies uncover connections between infants’ and toddlers’ early experiences and their later reading success, people within the field of education are taking note of what kinds of social experiences and language interactions are best for very young children.
These connections were on display at a webinar yesterday in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Education’s 2010 Reading Institute that will be held in Anaheim, CA next week. For the first time, the institute is featuring an “early learning and development strand” that focuses on children from birth through third grade. (A second webinar hosted by the National Institute for Early Education Research will run at 3 p.m. EDT on June 29.)
Ross Thompson, a psychology professor at the University of California at Davis, talked about the early language gap that occurs when children are introduced to language in very different ways depending on how parents and caregivers are speaking to them.
“We are seeing astonishing gaps even before age 3,” Thompson said.
Thompson cited neuroscience research as well as findings from the classic study, Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experiences of Young American Children, by researchers Betty Hart and Todd Risley. He described how advantaged children are steeped in a language environment with rich back-and-forth conversations, new vocabulary words, rhyming games and intimate moments in which both the adult and the child are jointly focused on a new discovery or object. Those experiences are less likely, he said, among babies and toddlers whose caregivers and parents are under economic stress, and who may not have the strong language and education backgrounds that enable those conversations.
Finding ways to immerse disadvantaged children in stronger social and language-rich environments while still emphasizing the primacy of parental ties is one of the challenges of the coming decade.
“Many early learning programs do not provide the quality daily experiences that we would like all children to have,” said Florence Nelson, a senior policy analyst for the Zero to Three National Center for Infants, Toddlers and Families, the non-profit organization that hosted yesterday’s webinar. “We need to make sure they are in settings with responsive and well-trained care-givers.”
Standards were on the mind of Peter Mangione, co-director of the Center for Child and Family Studies for WestEd, a research agency in California. He focused on the importance of recognizing the different ages and stages that children go through as they grow from infants to toddlers to 3-and 4-year-olds to kindergarteners.
Consider an 8-month-old, for example. “This is when a child is using and experimenting with sounds, and we need to be responsive to that,” Mangione said. “At 18 months, children are saying a few words and using gestures. And 36 months, they are combining words into simple sentences and combining phrases.” He recommended that standards and curricula should be written with these stages in mind, showing how later, more complex competencies (such as the use of grammar, or the ability to follow a narrative build) on a child’s earlier competencies.
One of the webinar’s concluding speakers was Carolyn Stevens, senior program analyst for the Office of Family Policy/Children and Youth at the Department of Defense, whose child care programs serve children from birth through age 12. She pointed out the need for an appropriate physical environment in early learning settings. Facilities that meet the Defense department’s standards, she said, must be comfortable, inviting spaces with high-quality books readily available and learning centers that include writing and dramatic play.
The event was a reminder that we cannot be afraid to talk about literacy learning among very young children. The foundations of reading, writing and communication are built in children’s earliest months and years. Kudos to the U.S. Department of Education for recognizing the need to include these ideas in its Reading Institute: Any smart literacy policy must support high-quality early learning environments in these very early years.
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