Moving Beyond the Reading Wars

There are certain sounds that I find soothing and have the power to both calm me and light up my brain. I love the sound of summer rain and wind chimes singing in a gentle breeze. I find baroque music relaxing in the background as I work. And the songs of birds make me smile.

For infants and young children the ultimate delight is the sounds of the voices of those who love and care for them. I have long thought that the infant’s first reading act is when they look into the eyes of a parent and gaze upon the love reflected back to them. Add to that the inevitable words of love that accompany that gaze. Every utterance communicates an endurable bond that grows and expands, signaling trust, commitment and worth.  It is the ultimate expression of being human. We care for and love our children and they depend on their mothers, fathers, families, and guardians to care for them. And the very sounds of their voices are like music —  the timbre of their voices, the rhythm and prosody of their words, declarations of love, and soothing caresses. It is no wonder that infants respond with delightful coos and chortles as they learn to communicate with their own new-found delightful voices.

Parentese is a term used to describe the style of speaking parents use with infants.  It occurs naturally when we talk to babies and young children and it’s almost universal across cultures and languages. You can easily recognize parentese – the speaker uses a higher pitch, slower tempo, and exaggerated tones. It sounds happy! Researchers at the University of Washington hypothesize that the role of parentese is to serve as a “social hook for the baby brain.” Not only is parentese important in the social development of children, but research has demonstrated that children who engaged in higher levels of this form of communication as babies were able to produce an average of 400 more words at 33 months than children who experienced lower amounts of parentese.

These are the nascent steps in literacy. Research has demonstrated the power of talking to and with infants and young children. It’s not simply the amount of words that is important, but the quality of the conversations. Children who are fortunate enough to live in families in which conversations are an integral part of daily life begin school with remarkably larger vocabularies than children who have not benefited from the same type of home environment.

To illustrate the importance of “talk” to the language and literacy development with young children, I’ll share an anecdote from Jim Trelease, author of the Read-Aloud Handbook. I attended a conference many years ago in which Jim Trelease was a featured speaker. I wanted to hear Trelease speak for a number of reasons. However, my primary reason for attending his presentation was personal. When I was expecting my first child, Trelease had recently published his first book, The Read-Aloud Handbook. I bought the book and read it like my mother had possibly read Dr. Spock’s book The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. Years later, when I was a teacher, I brought my tattered, dog-eared, and personally notated copy of Trelease’s book with me to his presentation. He was, after all, offering to autograph copies of his book afterwards. When I handed him my book to sign, he looked a little surprised and said something like, “Well, I haven’t seen that edition in a while!” Looking back, I think he really intended to autograph new just-purchased copies of his book and not first-gen editions like mine. But he smiled nonetheless and I still have that book today and refer to it often with my students.

 What stands out most from Jim Trelease’s presentation that day was his discussion of the Hart and Risley study that had recently been published in a book entitled Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experiences of Young American Children. I, too, had been captivated by this book that chronicled a longitudinal study of the spoken language interactions that take place with babies and toddlers in their homes. The data revealed stark differences among families based on socio-economic status. Trelease explained that his first impression of Hart and Risley’s study was skeptical. He went on to share an anecdote, however, that helped clarify the conclusions of the study for him. A month or so earlier he had been on vacation with his family at a beach. One morning he went for a walk on the beach, got a cup of coffee, and sat on a bench to read the newspaper while he watched the clouds breaking over a beautiful landscape. While he was enjoying the quiet of the morning, a young father sat nearby on the sand with his young son. They were playing with a toy truck. As the little boy tried to drive the truck, it kept getting stuck in the sand. While Trelease couldn’t hear much of the conversation, particularly the child’s words, his newspaper reading was interrupted several times by the father’s louder voice. What he heard were pedantic discussion about wheels, axles, depths of sand, tides, steering columns, etc. At one point Trelease said he was tempted to throw down his newspaper and coffee and yell, “For Christ’s sake, why don’t you just let the boy play with his truck?”

  It was then when he had a eureka moment and understood the point of the Hart and Risley study. It wasn’t about socioeconomics. It was about talkativeness and the quality of the talk. After all, he had no inkling about this father and son or other members of their family. What he did know is that the child was responding to the father, turning the truck over to look at the bottom, and trying different things to make the wheels turn. Overall, it seemed that they were enjoying their time on the beach. And, as Trelease explained, this child was devouring a set of vocabulary words and concepts that would equip him to think about the world about him throughout his childhood and life. And, in the bargain, he was spending a pleasant morning playing with his dad on the beach with a toy truck, probably peppering him with “why” questions.

This, I think, is a perfect example of the importance of the Hart and Risley study. Yes, they did find correlations among families based on socioeconomic status. Children raised by professional families with greater resources did speak with their children more and on a variety of topics and children raised by families without those economic resources were less likely to engage in enriched verbal interactions. And this did result in a wide variance in verbal acuity and vocabulary when these children began school. However, the study was correlational and described observed longitudinal patterns. It didn’t establish causation. The truth was, and still is, that young children thrive when their innate curiosity is acknowledged and nurtured by the adults in their lives. It is true, however, that parents who struggle financially to provide for their families also struggle to find enough time to spend with their children in enriching situations, engaged in conversations, playing without the constraints of time, and reading to their children.

If the nascent stage of literacy development begins with love, parentese, and conversations, the natural extension is reading to and with children. And the power of this in literacy and language development cannot be underestimated.