Talking with Children The Road to Literacy Dr. Carole Peterson Beulah Jesso Memorial University Funded by CLLRNet & NSERC

Talking with Children

The Road to Literacy

Dr. Carole PetersonBeulah JessoMemorial University

Funded by CLLRNet & NSERC

Talking with Children - The Path to Literacy 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


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


Properties of narratives

• Extended discourse

• Decontextualized

• Sentences must be cohesive

• Causal & temporal connections

• Overall structural coherence

• Evaluation


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


A tale of 3 stories


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


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


Differences between families

• Number of words spoken to child by parents

• Differences were stunning


What does this mean?

• Some children hear 2500 fewer words per hour.

• Extrapolating, some children have heard 32 million fewer words by kindergarten.


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.


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.


More than just word frequency is important

• Two types of language– Language directed toward care & socialization– Extended talk


Care & Socialization

behaviour management

imperatives prohibitions

Extended Talkpast events

properties of objects & events

feelings

explanations

future plans


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


Important finding

• Families did not differ in amount of ‘business talk’ (care & socialization)

• Huge differences in amount of extended talk.


Sentence Complexity

• Number of nouns, modifiers, & past-tense verbs per

utterance


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)


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


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


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.


Telling Their Life Adventures

Children learn to tell personal experience

narratives




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


Results: Context-setting information

pre-test post-test follow-up

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

Control

Intervention


Results: Total information

pre-test post-test follow-up0

40

80

120

160

Control

Intervention


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


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),


Method

• Low income families• Recruited from preschools• Randomly assigned to 2 groups

– Intervention– Craft activity


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


Intervention group

• Moms & children met weekly for 4 weeks• 1 ½ - 2 hours per week• Explained the importance of narratives for

school readiness


Parental concerns

• “But we never do anything or go anywhere”

• “We have nothing to talk about”





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


Principle 1

• Find the time to talk to your child one on one.


Principle 2

• Talk to your child about things that happened in the past. Do this over and over.


Principle 3

• Spend lots of time talking about each event.


Principle 4

• Help your child build a story with a beginning, middle and end.


Principle 5

• Ask “Wh” questions like who was there, what happened, where was this, when did that happen?


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.


Principle 7

• Help your child say more than one thing at a time. Say things like “really?” “yeah?” and “and?”


Principle 8

• 8. Talk about the things your child wants to talk about.


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


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


Strengths

• Doesn’t depend on parents having good reading skills

• Empowers parents who themselves have poor literacy skills

• Doesn’t involve expensive resources


Possible tangential effects

• Huebner taught parents to interact more constructively with preschoolers during book-reading

• Parents reported decreased parenting stress in follow-ups


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


Implications

• Professionals who deal with high-risk families

• Teachers in preschools

• Community centres

• School outreach programs


Long-term goals

• Develop a program that is easy to use & easy to deliver

• Can be readily used in a range of situations

• Can be used inexpensively in group settings

Documents

Talking with Children The Road to Literacy Dr. Carole Peterson Beulah Jesso Memorial University Funded by CLLRNet & NSERC