It's easy to forgive parents for feeling exhausted when faced with all the options to help improve their toddlers' literacy and language development before school: Think everything from flash cards to Baby Einstein DVDs.
But there's one thing that's so easy parents can do it any time, any place for free and kids will love it: Talk to them and give their fledgling words your full attention.
Inviting children to express their thoughts is a huge stepping stone to literacy, says Trish Main, a learning initiatives teacher with the Greater Victoria School District.
"Speech is a precursor to literacy," she says, noting that research has shown that by age five, a child from an impoverished background will hear 32 million fewer words than a middle-class child. That gives the child in a talkative home an astonishing leg up on learning, Main says, citing Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.
She wants parents to be part of the so-called war on word poverty, which researchers Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley refer to as "the early catastrophe." Their 2003 study taped 1,300 hours of casual conversation between 42 children and their families. It suggested that by age three, kids from high socio-economic homes had vocabularies of 1,116 words while children in homes receiving social assistance knew just 525 words. And that early foundation has a cascading effect on later learning and life.
"Chat to your child," Main says. "Not talk at, but allow your child to speak." Whenever and wherever you can. And be open to listening to your child. "What they want more than anything else is their parents' attention."
Get your child to ask you things, not just the other way around, Main says. "Predicting and questioning are huge learning strategies."
And have fun with nursery rhymes, she advises.
Cambridge University's Journal of Child Language notes "a strong relation between early knowledge of nursery rhymes and success in reading and spelling over the next three years even after differences in social background, IQ and the children's phonological skills ... are taken into account."
Phonological skills include the rules of pronunciation, and nursery rhymes are thught to enhance children's sensitivity to speech sounds.
Writing for the Encyclopedia of Language and Literacy Development, the web-based resource of the Canadian Language and Literacy Research Network, psychologist Andy Biemiller notes the link between a small vocabulary and lifelong lags in reading:
"Unfortunately, learning to read written texts is not the same as learning to understand written texts. Many children who successfully learn to read in Grade 1 or 2 are nonetheless unable to understand books they need to read by Grade 3 or 4. The main reason for this is a lack of adequate vocabulary."
The home and neighbourhood are the main sources for children's words, he writes, citing a widespread lack in primary schools of teaching the understanding of words along with the ability to read them.
Ultimately, kids with inadequate vocabularies, who are more frequently found in disadvantaged homes, have a much higher risk of poor grades in high school and college. The cycle of small vocabularies and low comprehension leads to less reading and a further decline in comprehension, Biemiller asserts.
A chart from Pearson Education Canada shows that a child who reads books on their own for 21 minutes per day will read 1.8 million words per year; at 14 minutes it will equal one million words per year and at three minutes only 200,000 words per year -- leading to an immense discrepancy in vocabulary.
