Story Telling Skills Linked To Literacy Of Children

http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/why_storytelling_skills_matter_for_african_american_kids?utm_source=Greater+Good+Science+Center&utm_campaign=d11014e4ba-GG_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_03_15&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_5ae73e326e-d11014e4ba-51673647: EST

Surprisingly neither of the persons who used to tell me exquisite stories (improvised and not from memory) was very literate. Well they were not African American either.



Additional reading:

• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4061698/ Nice article 
• Quote from this article : "Two different, and not mutually exclusive, arguments have been made for both these populations as to how their language skills could cause the frequently-observed achievement gaps. One argument is that the less successful children are deficient in their English language skills, and the children’s difficulties arise from these language deficits. The other argument is that the less successful children have different but not deficient language skills, and their academic difficulties arise from a mismatch between the skills the children possess and the skills that schools require." Both populations refer to (a) Children who come from lower socioeconomic strata (SES) and children who come from homes in which a language other than English is spoken and (b) children from middle class, monolingual English-speaking homes. 
• Is it possible that the actual issue is that the first group of children has lower comprehension skills which in turn causes those children to be poorer in English?
• Another quote: "Compared to mothers with more education, mothers with less education talk less to their children, and the nature of the speech they address to children is less supportive of language development than is the speech of more educated mothers. Lower SES mothers address speech to their children more frequently for the purpose of directing their children’s behavior and less frequently for the purpose of eliciting and maintaining conversation...  In talking to their children, lower SES mothers make use of a smaller vocabulary, less complex syntactic structures, and less variety among the syntactic structures used, compared to higher SES mothers... Multiple studies have found that the properties characteristic of higher SES mothers are positive predictors of children’s language development—even within SES." Wowowow.
• "In the U.S., 31% of children who speak English but who hear a language other than English [Largely Latinos] at home fail to complete high school, compared to 10% for students who speak only English at home...This phenomenon is not unique to the U.S. In many other countries as well, low levels of academic achievement characterize the children of immigrants and are cause for national concern." Does this extend to Chinese and Indian children also? Probably not. The issue, I believe, is not so much because of hearing another language at home but because of the kind of immigrants. Chinese and Indians belong to a higher SES (socio economic status) than Latinos. 
• "Place and Hoff found that together the number of different English speakers and the proportion of English input provided by native speakers were a significant source of variance in bilingual 2-year-olds English language skills, over and above the variance accounted for by the number of hours of English exposure."

Published on

3/18/17, 3:12 PM

India Standard Time