02/23/05
Parents Hold Keys to Babies' Literacy
Written by Caroline Jackson Blakemore
From the Opinion page of North County Times, Community Forum, Saturday, January 27, 2005

Charles R. Stichter II stated in an earlier Community Forum ("Federal schools reform leaves accountability behind," 1/15/05) that one of the shortcomings of the No Child Left Behind Act was the lack of a student accountability component. How can we hold young students accountable when there isn't a level playing field? Many children come to Kindergarten with a lack of necessary literacy skills. These skills include listening comprehension and good vocabulary.

Our education system doesn't take into account that parents are children's first and most important teachers. The most important educational gift that parents give their babies is language, the first building block of literacy.

Children who hear the most words from their parents and family (not TV) will be the most academically successful. Based on the research of Drs. Hart and Risley, children who come from language rich environments will have heard 32 million more words by the time they are four than children who come from poor language backgrounds. The children with such language deficits rarely catch up to their language rich peers, who begin reading early, read more, and acquire a vast vocabulary that puts them at the top of their classes.

Intervention starting with three -year- old preschool children isn't early enough. Dr. Pamela High of Rhode Island Hospital, did a study in which her staff taught low income parents how to read daily to their babies starting at six months. By eighteen months the babies who had been read to had twice as much receptive vocabulary (vocabulary that babies understand) as the babies in the study that weren't read to. Many parents don't realize their power as their baby's key to future academic success.

Listening comprehension determines reading comprehension. Comprehension is the most important ingredient of good reading. Decoding skills are essential, but decoding without comprehension is not reading. Any child of any ability can be taught to decode, even if they have poor language. But children who have poor vocabulary and poor listening comprehension have difficulty learning read.

Daily reading to babies, starting at birth, is a key to ensuring that babies get enough language to achieve future success in school. It doesn't matter which language, as long as babies here lots of words.

As the read-aloud guru Jim Trelease states so simply, "if the child has never heard the word, the child will never say the word; and if you have neither heard it nor said it, it's pretty tough to read it and to write it." Since learning language starts from day one, the first two years of life are crucial for language/literacy development.

Until we, as a nation, recognize the importance of vocabulary and language input in the first years of life in the development of later reading skills, we will continue to overlook the real cause of the ever widening literacy gap. The simple act of daily reading to your baby not only promotes bonding between parent and child, but also can be the most important investment parents make toward their child's future educational success.

Escondido resident Caroline Jackson Blakemore was a reading teacher for Valley Center Pauma Unified School District for twenty-five years.


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