A year in words: The dynamics and consequences of language experiences in an intervention classroom

Abstract

Children from low SES backgrounds hear, on average, fewer words at home than those from high SES backgrounds. This word gap is associated with widening achievement differences in children’s language abilities and school readiness. However relatively little is known about adult and child speech in childcare settings, in which approximately 30% of American children are enrolled. We examined the influence of teacher and peer language input on children’s in-class language use and language development in an intervention classroom for low-SES, high-risk 2- to 3-year-olds. Over the course of a year, day-long recordings of the classroom were collected weekly with LENA recorders. Using LENA software algorithms, we found that language input from peers was positively related to children’s in-class language use, both in-the-moment and over the course of each day, as were the number of conversational turns in which children and teachers engaged Both peer input and conversational turns with teachers were also positively related to children’s language development rates, as indexed by increases in vocabulary size. Together these results indicate the importance of child-specific rates of classroom language input in the language development of high-risk, preschoolers.

The preschool classroom linguistic environment: Children’s first-person experiences

“…It was interesting, for example, that two children (E and M) tended to hear a similar number of sentences per minute from their peers and teachers. Our finding converges with those of Perry et al [34], who found that in a classroom some children tended to be more exposed to peers’ and teachers’ talk than others. These authors suggested that children’s language skills may contribute to the explanation of this variability.…”

“…It is also possible that children evoke different learning opportunities based on individual characteristics [32,23]. Perry et al [34], for instance, found that young children who vocalized more tended to be more exposed to verbal input from peers and engaged in conversational turns with their teachers. By examining the individual experiences within a classroom, we can better understand how classroom-based interventions and teacher-language-enhancing interventions reach individual children, and why some of them do not have the expected impact on children’s development [37,38].…”

Put Your Data to Use: Entering the Real World of Children and Families

“…Though the world mobilized around the 30-million-word gap that focused on amount of talk, we thought that these conversational duets contained the quality tofoster children’s language learning. Our findings and a number of other studies supported these conclusions (Gilkerson et al, 2018; Perry et al, 2018; Romeo et al, 2018; Cartmill et al, 2013; Rowe, 2012). Remedies for the word gap were likely found in the serve-and-return of conversation rather than playing the television to increase language input or overheard speech from conversations between adults (Golinkoff, Hoff, Rowe, Tamis-LeMonda, Hirsh-Pasek, 2018).…”

Comparing Automatic and Manual Measures of Parent–Infant Conversational Turns: A Word of Caution

“…Over the last decade, LENA has been used across many languages to study the links between the language input and language outcomes, to characterize specific language environments, to study clinical populations, and to provide linguistic feedback to caregivers (see the list of over 100 publications at www.lena.org/research/). Of the three primary LENA measures, CTC has recently received the most attention, as it is interpreted as a proxy for high-quality "serve and return" caregiver-child interactions, child engagement, and adult responsiveness, and thus a key component of high-quality language environments (Christakis, Lowry, Goldberg, Violette, & Garrison, 2019;Gilkerson et al, 2017Gilkerson et al, , 2018Perry et al, 2018;Zimmerman et al, 2009; see also http://lena.org/conversa tional-turns). In the present study, we take a closer look at this measure.…”