Talking about Talking

As the mother of a toddler, it's difficult for me to view the information learned in class on a purely professional level. Like all parents, I want my child to succeed and thrive more than anything in the world, so anything I can learn to give her a leg up in life is of profound interest to me.

One of the things emphasized in the readings over and over again is the importance of talk in developing language skills in children. While I knew this before, I didn't fully appreciate the almost abysmal achievement gap insufficient talk creates. This is particularly prevalent in children of poverty. Impoverished parents tend to focus their talk most on discipline and behavior correction, limiting the amount of vocabulary used in those interactions.

I was intrigued by discussion of narrative development in children. While I find charming the disjointed and sometimes fanciful stories my daughter tells me, it never occurred to me that her doing so was a developmental milestone, or that there was a documented pattern of progression for her stories. The ability to tell about past experiences in a linear fashion focusing on a main event and what happens after is crucial to creating meaning from storybooks and other narrative texts. As such, they are an important part of literacy development. Parents would be well served to ask their children about their day, following up with open-ended questions to elicit responses and help their children develop these skills. I know I've started doing it with my daughter more after learning about the research.

One final note I found important was the encouragement for parents to speak to their children in the language they know best. My husband and I are raising our daughter to be bilingual, since Spanish is my husband's first language and the only language most of his family speaks. When we first decided to go this route, he was very hesitant, and worried that it would negatively affect her school performance later. The readings this week as well as other research I've done on my own all indicate that any vocabulary gains a child makes in any language will ultimately benefit the child, regardless of what the "target" or "school" language is. The point is not to learn English or learn Spanish but to learn language and to foster the brain development that facilitates that. The library system I work at has a large amount of Spanish-speaking patrons. I've watched many parents struggling to speak to their children only in English so they don't "fall behind" when they get to school. Sharing this research with second language learners would be very beneficial, not only fostering the child's development, but also providing already struggling parents with increased peace of mind.