From Babbling to Books: Building Pre-Reading Skills

Studio

Delia Pompa: Hello, I’m Delia Pompa. Welcome to this year’s second teleconference in the Reading Rockets series — Achieving Success in Reading. Today we’re going to look at how what happens before children enter school affects their ability to learn to read. Here to help us are three of the nation’s leading experts in early childhood education. Dr. Todd Risley is the co-author of the seminal research study “Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children.” He is professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Alaska.

Dr. Sharon Ramey is co-director for the Center on Health and Education at Georgetown University.

And Dr. Julie Washington is a professor in the department of audiology and speech-language pathology at Wayne State University.

We would also like to welcome our audience of parents, teachers and professionals who care deeply about improving the lives of children. Later on in the show we’ll be taking some of their questions. We’ll start with Dr. Risley.

Dr. Risley, you and your colleague, Dr. Betty Hart, produced a study that documented the types of daily interactions parents have with young children. In a nutshell, what did you learn?

Dr. Todd R. Risley: What we learned was that, before the child is three… Remember a child is awake about a hundred hours a week — that’s learning opportunity time. The question is how is that time filled up, or is it empty? What we learned was the incredible differences between families in amount of talking that parents did with their babies.

For example, the average child by the age of three has heard 20 million words addressed to them. Children of very talkative, socially interactive families have heard 35 million words addressed to them by the age of three. Children of very taciturn or non-responsive families have heard less than 10 million words addressed to them.

This plays out in the child’s vocabulary size. So, the average child has about a 700-word vocabulary by the age of three. Children of very sociable, interactive families have a vocabulary of about 1100 words. Children of very taciturn, non-reactive families have only about a 500-word vocabulary.

Those differences before age three — we’re talking about babies before age three in the, kind of, the bosom of their families in the home. 15 thousand hours of experience has got to be filled up, or remain empty. And that difference is extraordinarily great and extraordinarily important, way before we even start talking about reading.

Delia Pompa: So the amount of talking that happens at home matters. But what about the quality — does it matter what we’re talking to kids about?

Dr. Todd R. Risley: That’s another discovery we found. And that is: the more you talk, the higher the quality of what you say. If you only… everybody says a certain amount of business talk, “stop that,” “get down from there,” “don’t do that” — something they think to get something done. Everybody does that whether they only talk a little or talk a lot. But if you only talk a little, that’s all you’re saying. When you’re talking a lot, all the complexity and everything else, it’s about something else. It’s chit-chat, it’s gossip, it’s commentary. All the richness is in the extra talk.

So the message is don’t worry, talk a lot; it will automatically be rich. It’ll be positive and rich because it’s not about business.

Delia Pompa: So hanging around while my mom gossiped was a good thing.

Dr. Todd R. Risley: That’s true.

Delia Pompa: What factors contribute to a richer language environment?

Dr. Todd R. Risley: Well it really is the amount of talking and ‘dancing’ the parents are doing with the baby that is the richer environment. You know, with young babies, the important part of their world is their care-giver, is the interaction of the adult who has to take care of them, who has to be there to protect and nurture. And so the amount of dancing that adult is doing with the baby is the richer environment, automatically; that’s the focus, so to say, with babies.

Now with older kids you’re talking about content, you’re talking about more important things to teach children. But with babies it’s all about the everyday experiences that are in front of babies all the time. And it’s whether you add words to those experiences in interaction with the baby or not. That’s the simple message. You don’t have to worry about how to talk to your baby, just talk a lot.

Delia Pompa: Thanks, Dr. Risley. Let’s take a look at a pre-school in Silver Spring, Maryland, where care-givers use everyday conversation to improve children’s oral language skills.

Video

Daphne Jones: I think Tyree picked out this book. Did you pick out this book?

Tyree: Nope.

Daphne Jones: Who picked the book?

Announcer: At a Maryland day care center, two- and three-year-olds are engaged in conversation by care-giver Daphne Jones.

Daphne Jones: What kind of truck is that?

Tyree: Go-cart!

Daphne Jones: A go-cart truck? Have you ever been on a go-cart truck?

Girl: Go up and down!

Daphne Jones: Up and down. That’s what the truck did. The truck went up and down.

Announcer: Dr. Debra Jervay Pendergrass is co-director of this program, called STORIES.

Dr. Debra Jervay Pendergrass: We believe that every child regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, disability has a story to tell.

Announcer: When adults respond to a toddler’s efforts to communicate, they help the development of spoken language. Jervay Pendergrass has identified 15 specific clues that adults can watch for. Dr. Debra Jervay Pendergrass: It may be a word, word combinations, a sentence, or a series of sentences put together. A gesture, a facial expression, a cry…

Zoe: Ow!

Dr. Debra Jervay Pendergrass: Zoe is saying “ow, something happened.”

Announcer: Jervay Pendergrass videotapes the kids. To train care-givers, she picks out good examples of when adults tune-in to a child, or instructive cases when they miss an opportunity to connect.

Dr. Debra Jervay Pendergrass: And then we have Amber who’s saying, “Daphne, we got stuck,” which means “we got stuck again.” But she’s using a two-word combination to communicate that story.

Announcer: By opening our eyes to young kids’ efforts to communicate Jervay Pendergrass hopes to increase conversation, boost vocabulary and propel toddlers towards literacy.

Dr. Debra Jervay Pendergrass: With young children, things that we take for granted, for them, are important stories, important experiences to share. Language is free. It’s a gift that we can give our children anytime and in any place. The only thing that it costs us is our time.

Studio

Delia Pompa: So Dr. Risley, we just saw three-year-olds who are learning to use language. At what age do children first start paying attention to the words they hear?

Dr. Todd R. Risley: From the very beginning. There isn’t any magical time. What we see is talkative parents are adding words and talking as much to infants and newborn babies as they are to toddlers. They’re talking a lot or they’re talking a little. It doesn’t change with the baby as the baby gets old. So talking, as far as we know, has an impact from the very beginning, adding words to experience.

Adding words whether it’s… you know, whether you know the full meaning of the word. You’re adding and associating words with everything that’s going on, that the child is looking at and tending to. And filling the child’s life up — in addition to what they’re seeing — with words and language seems to be the important variable.

Dr. Sharon Landesman Ramey: Babies hear prenatally. If you sing a song or say a poem, when the baby’s born they’ll recognize the cadence and the rhythm and the sounds. So babies are tuned in really early; even before birth.

Dr. Julie Washington: For those of us who like sports, one of the metaphors that I like to use with parents is that talking to your baby is like color commentary in a football game; just talk, narrate. Talk about what you’re doing, talk about what you see, talk about what’s going on. It may seem odd to people who are watching when you’re standing in the kitchen saying, “I think I’ll cook an omelet; I’m not sure whether I want mushrooms in it or whether I want peppers in it.” But to the baby it’s all talk, and it’s all engagement, and it’s all listening and learning and contributes to later language development.

Delia Pompa: Dr. Ramey, is there a difference between what babies learn about when they’re spoken to as opposed to what they learn from observing language as it’s spoken around them?

Dr. Sharon Landesman Ramey: Well for a little baby it’s all through the interaction. They see your eyes light up; they watch your mouth. They learn that it is, as Dr. Risley was saying, it’s a dance. They learn a great deal. In addition to vocabulary they’re learning this is a way of social interaction that can be rewarding. From a distance — like watching words on TV or listening to radio or to the stereo — when they’re little they don’t learn very much from a distance.

Delia Pompa: What about you, Dr. Risley? I’m curious; what they’re hearing versus how they’re hearing it, does it make a difference?

Dr. Todd R. Risley: Those are all intertwined. Because talkative families talk to everybody talking to each other. Taciturn families only talk business to each other. To the baby, you know, they only talk simple things. And so what you see as a child who’s talked to a lot is also immersed in a language culture where people are talking to each other a lot. Whereas a child who is not talked to very much is immersed in a culture where people are not talking to each other. So they’re hearing it addressed to him at the same time they’re hearing an interchange with other people. But they go together so tightly in a given family.

Dr. Julie Washington: And part of the dance we’re talking about is not just learning words, it’s the non-verbal social environment around talking that children are also learning. They’re learning about emotions. They’re learning about the social context that goes with the words that they hear in the family and with the interactions in the family. All of that comes from listening, from being talked to, from observing. And so they’re learning how to be social beings by listening to you talk.

Delia Pompa: Following up on that, how do children begin to assign meanings to words?

Dr. Julie Washington: We talk about children assigning meaning to words through a process called fast mapping. And that is: that children hear a word in the context of an activity, or in the context of an object, or a person and they map meaning on to it. And so, for example, if a child’s first exposure to an animal is a dog — we all know, if we have young children — from that point forward every four-legged animal with a tail and two ears is a dog.

And over time what children do is refine those definitions and differentiate so that eventually they learn that cows also have four legs, a tail, but they make a different sound and they give milk. And so they refine those definitions over time. And children who have world experience are the ones who refine the definitions. So the exposure to the cow, whether it’s through a book or through the zoo, allows them to refine the definition. And so when we’re teaching children the sounds that animals make it’s not just a game, it is the process of refinement for a young child.

And play is work when you’re a child, and so the more you learn through interactions and through the play and book-reading, you’re really learning about the world in a way that adults loose track of, I think. And if you pay a lot of attention to your child you can learn new things too as an adult by listening to them. But they map meaning on to words.

And so we want to be really careful in classrooms. I like to tell teachers about asking “does anybody know what something means” and having children give the wrong definition. Because there are several children in that room who are going to get that definition and hold on to it, that’s what fast mapping is about. So the next class, when you come back and you talk about that issue, you’re unteaching things that a few children in the room learned because somebody said a dog was something that it wasn’t.

And so rather than unteaching those things it makes more sense for the teacher to put those definitions forward in the beginning what you want them to learn; allow them to map on to it and then expand it from there.

Delia Pompa: Your colleagues had enthusiastic nods here. Dr. Ramey, would you like to add something to that?

Dr. Sharon Landesman Ramey: When you said play is work, I want to be sure it’s the good kind of work.

Dr. Julie Washington: That’s right.

Dr. Sharon Landesman Ramey: It’s the kind of work you want to get up and go to. Children love words. Words are actually sensuous. They like the feeling inside their mouth that their tongue moving and making new sounds. Children can often pronounce words that are difficult for us as adults. It’s quite amazing. They like multi-syllable words. So people often underestimate them because they’re so little and aren’t worldly yet, and only teach them simplistic words. But trying giving a toddler or a young child a great big huge word and let them get their hands and heads and mouths around that word; they just adore learning language.

Delia Pompa: Dr. Risley, what about parents, the taciturn families that don’t talk, what can we do to help them understand, and to do?

Dr. Todd R. Risley: Get examples and the message out. We don’t need to confuse them by saying you’ve got to talk differently to your child. We need to say it’s a matter of talking more, and you know how. Every parent, even the most taciturn parent, had a time they were up-beat and feeling good and were talking a lot to their child. And their language was complex and had all the good things to it too. So it’s a matter of getting that across to people who have grown up in taciturn families themselves, who’ve never seen people chit-chat and play and comment and gossip to their baby.

That’s something that’s alien to some families, some cultures, some sub-cultures. And it’s a matter of we need to get that message out: don’t worry about what it is you’re saying, talk a lot, because automatically it will be good if you talk more than just business.

The problem of course is that in a family micro-culture that’s very taciturn, it’s only business that people talk to each other. When the children themselves come to talk, they have a very low vocabulary and they don’t talk very much either. Because they only talk about business, too, about getting something done.

But it’s the message of getting it and saying don’t worry about content, talk a lot — this is to babies. We need to worry about content later on when we’re talking about schools and teachers. But with babies, just talking will give you, automatically give you the rich content.

Delia Pompa: Well beyond taciturn families, Dr. Washington, what can we do to help parents who themselves are reluctant readers or don’t have a rich vocabulary of their own?

Dr. Julie Washington: I think, I really resonate to some of the things that Dr. Risley is saying about talking. Because when we’re talking about reading, it’s the same issue: that you want to get the message out that it is important to interact around books. Reading is not necessarily the point, certainly with very young children it’s the interaction around the book.

And it’s also important, as we’re getting the message out, that as professionals we’re providing models for what this looks like and what we’re asking parents to do. A lot of times we tell parents to read to children. And for a parent who’s a reluctant reader or who doesn’t have good reading skills themselves, how to do that is something that they’re not quite sure about. And so modeling the interaction around the book… if you have a 30-page book and a three-year-old child, the point is not getting through the 30 pages. The point is the book, the narrative — you can use books that don’t have words, word-less picture books. It’s the story, it’s the interaction, it’s the talking, it’s being involved with the child.

And I think getting that out to parents and showing them, and telling them that the point really is the interaction — it’s not how well you read to your child, it’s not that you read the whole book. It’s that you have the interaction around the book, that you tie it to things that are important in your family. And make reading a fun activity and an important activity for children. Children have to realize the value of reading and that it’s an exciting thing to do; it’s a fun thing to do with your parents; it’s cuddle time with mom or dad; and reading becomes something that children want to do.

And that’s something we’re really trying to teach at these young ages before children are in school that books are good; reading is good and the experience is great.

Delia Pompa: I like how you all characterize it as the dance. It sounds like it is very much a dance.

Dr. Julie Washington: Yes.

Delia Pompa: Dr. Ramey, talk about the behaviors that care-givers should adopt to help build a young child’s language.

Dr. Sharon Landesman Ramey: Well, we have identified seven kinds of behaviors that parents, teachers, older siblings, anyone who loves and cares about children should adopt. And these are based on literally thousands of scientific studies. And what’s really neat about these seven learning essentials is that every one has been linked to brain development as well as to behavioral competence, to intelligence, to happiness, to a sense of well-being. So the seven essentials are learning…

Delia Pompa: You are going to tell us, right?

Dr. Sharon Landesman Ramey: I’m going to tell you. The first is to encourage exploration. That the child touches the world, tastes the world, looks at the world. And as the baby gets older you do it through talking and demonstrating. But to be open, to actively experience. Not passively, to actively explore the world.

The second is to mentor the child in what we call the basics. And mentoring is just teaching with love, with the well-being of the learner central to your activities. And some people say, “Well what do I teach them, what words?” Teach them anything that you like. Teach them anything that you know. Teaching is good.

Delia Pompa: Give us an example of mentoring, because we often think of mentoring as someone who comes in from the outside and engages with the child a short period of time, is that what you’re talking about?

Dr. Sharon Landesman Ramey: No. When I’m with my little baby granddaughter I teach her “up and down.” And I’m mentoring her, because I’m thinking about her well-being and her ability to learn the idea of up and down. And then I might say “up and down, those are opposite, they’re not the same.” And mentoring is really teaching where you care about the well-being of someone else. You’re not doing it to elevate yourself, you’re doing it for them.

So you encourage them to explore, you mentor, and then when they learn something you celebrate, you reinforce. Every culture celebrates walking and talking, but every day there’s something new to celebrate. It’s not just saying “you’re great” or “you’re smart,” it’s “oh, you did that,” and linking it to the child’s behavior.

Then after you celebrate the new behavior; practice time. So you rehearse, you review, you extend the new behavior because every behavior can be used in a more sophisticated way; it’s multipurpose. So you help the children get good at what they’ve learned.

And then in the whole process you always think about protecting the child from inappropriate punishment and teasing and a kind of harshness that’s not right for their age. We’ve watched teachers and parents who deeply care about their children, and they want their children to be well-behaved. And they’ll end up punishing them or being mean to them when they’re real little and they can’t understand why someone’s doing that. And being mad at them, I mean I child who’s crawling around is going to grab a cord. And if the baby is only 11 months old they don’t know it’s electrical and they don’t know it’s attached to something that can break. And you can yell and scream and get mad, but the child won’t get the idea because they’ve got little pull toys that you tell them… and they can’t tell the difference. So you don’t get mad at a child for something they don’t yet understand.

Delia Pompa: These steps sound like a lot that’s going on. How does that affect brain development?

Dr. Sharon Landesman Ramey: Well each of those effect different parts of the brain. But like when you celebrate there’s a whole lot of neurochemistry that gets changed when you feel happy. When someone says, “Wow, you were the best moderator for this panel,” there’s going to be some things happening in your brain. And it’s going to make you want to get in that situation again. You’re going to want to come back and moderate even more panels because people love the job you’re doing. And so there are a lot of things that happen.

With language we know if children don’t hear certain sounds, or perhaps if they don’t make certain sounds when they’re really little, it’s very difficult to acquire them later. It’s not that it’s all over or impossible, but you’ve really missed an important window of opportunity for brain development.

Delia Pompa: Talk a little bit more about rich language development because that seems like the most important step that we can take in schools and at home.

Dr. Sharon Landesman Ramey: Well again, a lot of children… I was hearing Todd Risley say these families that just don’t talk. There are those families, but we have seen a few families that don’t realize the importance of talking to the little ones, so it’s more a grown-up level of conversation. And the children are being more neglected before they’re talkers. And I think some parents don’t realize that children’s comprehension or understanding is much more advanced than their ability to say words. And so the rich language is really engaging the child.

I mean sometimes it’s “parentese,” sometimes its silly kind of behaviors. If a child makes a gurgley sound you can go mimic the child, and then the child might mimic what you’re doing. And you can play games with sounds. That doesn’t even have to be words or conversation.

And which, again, they’re understanding that sounds coming from me cause a response from the world: “The world pays attention to me when I make noise; and when I say words: wow.” And so you’ll see a lot of young parents now saying to a little child, “use your words.” So instead of a child just pointing like I want that, “I want an apple.” And you say, “Oh, you want an apple; then I’ll get you an apple.” And then you begin to talk about the apple and give the discourse and help the child learn. And so that’s what the rich language is all about.

Delia Pompa: Now, of the seven elements — I called the steps earlier but they’re really elements — of the seven elements, guiding and limiting behavior is one that our audience might have a little bit of a time understanding how that’s going to help language development.

Dr. Sharon Landesman Ramey: Well, if a child were not to tune in and pay attention you might miss things in certain settings. I mean there’s a time, again, with socialization. And I think the main reason that being a well-socialized — not a perfect kid, I mean you want kids to have fun. We’re not talking about conforming or restricting a child, but learning… you know, there’s different rules when you go to some places than in other places. When you’re on the playground you can use a different kind of voice and level of speaking than when you’re in a place that’s supposed to be quiet like a movie theater or a church or temple.

Delia Pompa: A refinement of language?

Dr. Sharon Landesman Ramey: It’s a refinement. But a child who’s perceived to understand that he or she belongs to lots of groups and to a community is a child that other people are going to want to spend time with. And if the child has people spending time with him or her, that’s when they learn.

Delia Pompa: Almost all children have learned to speak with ease by age three, but there are some children that haven’t and they have great difficulty. What is that?

Dr. Sharon Landesman Ramey: Well, there are a lot of reasons. I mean, there are children with special needs that can contribute. A specialist needs to be involved in that. Kids can of course have hearing problems and speech production. But in our own research we find that children who are lagging in their speech development, almost always it’s been a lack of experience. They haven’t had enough people talk to them in ways to build that vocabulary to keep pace with children their age. So very often it’s lack of the right kinds of experiences.

Delia Pompa: Dr. Washington, how does that track with your experience?

Dr. Julie Washington: I think that’s true when we’re talking about children who are typically developing. When we’re talking about children who have language impairments or who are not developing language like their peers, we find that more than half those children will have reading problems later.

Reading and writing are really language on paper. And so a child who has a good oral foundation will often make the transition to reading much more easily than a child who has speech or language problems that are impeding their movement toward relating to text in a different way.

And so those skills are really important. When I listen to Sharon talk about all the things that we’re teaching children when they’re young it’s like money in the bank; you are saving for later. Children are learning a lot about language now but the foundation that you lay when you’re three- or four-years-old is the foundation that you build on as you are getting older and you’re five- or six-years-old.

When that foundation is weak or nonexistent it doesn’t give teachers a whole lot to work with. And we have to think about a different starting point for those kids, that we need to back up, think about where we’re starting with a child. That’s that notion of individualizing, thinking about where a child is and moving forward. But children who really are having trouble developing language very often have difficulty learning to read and write.

Delia Pompa: Dr. Ramey, are children who are naturally more verbal going to develop better oral language skills?

Dr. Sharon Landesman Ramey: There’s certainly a tendency, because children who are more verbal will receive from others more verbal input. So a child who’s talkative is inviting to adults to engage in conversation. But there are some children who are shy and kind of quiet who are absorbing a great deal. I mean children are like sponges, and they certainly can be building that foundation to be successful readers, to be bright, accomplished children. So talkativeness, it’s useful but there are other ways of getting to a good end of being a great student and a good social partner that is not quite so talkative.

Delia Pompa: What about reading to a child, how does that affect their language development?

Dr. Sharon Landesman Ramey: Reading, again, I say for little babies, reading is a great thing for grownups because it’s a book and it reminds you about a lot. It’s an excuse for conversation. In my era, I don’t think parents read to babies, but my parents told stories and they sang songs, and they did nursery rhymes all the time. And so, it’s the oral language environment. And books are a part of it. Then when you read to young children they learn concepts of print, how to turn the page. They learn that books are filled with fun and adventure, and they are pretty, and they can be touched and, you know, all these wonderful books that have things that you can manipulate. And so, they can get turned on to books, but books are really integrated with the oral language tradition.

Delia Pompa: Thank you, that’s a lot for us to think about. Here’s a head start classroom in New York. Let’s see how teachers there use books to stimulate children’s language.

Video

Teacher: Ring-around-the-Rosie

Narrator: Many of these 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds are at risk for reading failure. They come from poor families, and poverty is clearly linked to low reading achievement. But they are being given a great boost in this Long Island Head Start classroom. The teacher Grace Wilson will use a new method of reading aloud which increases vocabulary. Devised by Dr. Russ Whitehurst, the technique is called dialogic reading.

Dr. Russ Whitehurst: Dialogic reading is a type of shared book reading that is different in some respects from book reading as you would normally be exposed for it. Dialogic reading involves much more frequent verbal interactions, tends to place the child more in the role of the teller of the story, and the adult in the role of the listener — the person who listens to the child, who responds to what the child says, who prompts the child to say more.

Narrator: The classes here are small, a key prescription of dialogic reading. This allows Ms. Wilson to ask questions to each child. The simplest questions are: who, what, when, and how many.

Grace Wilson: Anisha, What colors are the flowers? White. There was very little grass in the valley and the billy goats were so hungry. First the youngest Billy Goat Gruff…

Narrator: Ms. Wilson uses a completion prompt, a straightforward fill in the blank.

Grace Wilson: Roared the mean old…

Class: Troll!

Grace Wilson: He was very…

Class: Mean! Ugly!

Grace Wilson: You’re right. Show me something that really looks ugly on this troll. What is that? Hair? That is very ugly, you are right.

Narrator: As kids get older, dialogic reading challenges them to connect the story with outside-the-class experiences. Ms. Wilson draws out these links with queries called distancing questions.

Grace Wilson: When was it that we touched a goat?

Grace Wilson: Two weeks ago we were at the Holtsville ecology site, and they got to see goats. So that should add to their input and hopefully they’ll remember that they saw goats there.

Narrator: Dialogic reading was designed to help kids who were slow in developing spoken language. But this simple technique turns out to help all children.

Dr. Barbara Foorman: This procedure, which is fairly easy to teach, but not something that everyone thinks of doing, has a lot of payoff. It’s been shown to actually benefit children’s listening comprehension and vocabulary development.

Narrator: With the new tool of dialogic reading, Ms. Wilson is helping her head start classroom live up to its name.

Grace Wilson: So, snip snap snout, this tale’s told out. Now what do we say at the end of the story, boys and girls?

Class: The End!

Grace Wilson: Excellent!