The evidence is strong that young people who are not fluent readers and writers by the end of third grade may never catch up to their peers. Dr. Connie Juel (Univ. of Va.) found that first graders who were not on grade level by the end of the year had only a 1 in 10 chance of ever achieving grade level reading proficiency.
During the critical early years of cognitive development, many impoverished children lack opportunities to build their literacy skills. They generally hear 30 million fewer words by age three than their more privileged peers do (due to a limited experience of being spoken or read aloud to). When these disadvantaged children start kindergarten, they are already well behind their more affluent peers in terms of vocabulary knowledge. Without effective intervention, this “literacy gap” grows wider as years pass. (Hart, B. and Risley, T., The 30 Million Word Gap. American Educator, Spring 2003.)
Dr. Lesley Morrow (Rutgers Univ.) has gathered and conducted research showing that literacy learning begins in infancy, and parents and caregivers need to provide a rich literacy environment to help children acquire literacy skills.
Studies show that children entering Kindergarten may have as much of a vocabulary gap as eight years - even before they begin school. That is because a child who has not been read aloud to may have the limited vocabulary of a 2-year-old, while a child who has been read aloud to every day may have the vocabulary of a 10-year-old. The average middle income child has 1200 hours of being read aloud to, compared to 25 hours for low income children.
Dr. Marie Clay (Reading Recovery, New Zealand) has determined that many children are adrift in early reading instruction because they do not understand print conventions. These include concepts such as reading left to right, reading the left page before the right page, understanding punctuation and capitalization, and knowing that the printed text and not the picture is being decoded. The first-grade instruction, “Let’s look at the first word in this sentence,” directed to a child who is weak about print concepts, is incomprehensible if the difference between a word, a sentence and what is “first” is not understood.
In Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children (National Research Council), the researchers state that “there is abundant empirical and observational evidence that the children who are particularly likely to have difficulty with learning to read in the primary grades are those who begin school with less prior knowledge and skill in certain domains, most notably, general verbal abilities, phonological sensitivity, familiarity with the basic purposes and mechanisms of reading, and letter knowledge. It is clear from the research on emergent literacy that important experiences related to reading begin very early in life. Primary prevention steps designed to reduce the number of children with inadequate literacy-related knowledge (e.g., concepts of print, phonemic awareness, receptive vocabulary) at the onset of formal schooling would considerably reduce the number of children with reading difficulties and thereby, the magnitude of the problem currently facing schools.”
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