Monday Night Musing #6 - How Many Words?

Salvēte omnēs!

Welcome back to my series of short posts where I set the timer for 15 minutes and give you a little something read each week. The topic this week comes straight from the news, specifically this NPR story about the '30 Million Word Gap'. Are you familiar with the TMWG? If you are not familiar, there was a study done investigating differences within the homes of families from different socio-economic groups. The key finding reported was that there were vast differences in the words heard within these households, with the higher socio-economic class having a noted advantage not only in terms of total vocabulary words used by adults, but also the positivity and praising nature of the words. Hence the phrase "30 Million Word Gap" describing the difference between the professional income group and the poverty income group.

For more about it, see the following:

• A Freakonomics episode from 2015
• Here's a quick summary of the study
• The book by Dana Suskind (interviewed in the above episode) 
• The program at the University of Chicago seeking to prevent the gap 

Firstly, for any of us who use CI to teach a language, knowing about the Hart & Risley study is important because it has had such a strong influence not on foreign language education, but on literacy education in general as well as many people's perspectives on what factors influence student success when it comes to language learning (in the case of the study, first language learning).

Second, because of the marquee usage of the '30 Million Word Gap' phrase, the actual number that makes up the gap has been called into question. When I heard that again in the NPR piece, my CI-influenced brain said - were those repetitions comprehensible? Or just total? And then I remembered that the study just measured total words, not meaningful repetitions. As a CI teacher, I'm going for quality more than just raw quantity. Sometimes the way the Hart & Risley study has been utilized emphasizes quantity more than quality, and other times it flips the other way. So is the point here about CI? Or is it immersion? And is anyone monitoring the difference?

Third, I think the criticisms in the recent NPR story are fair to bring up. No piece of research is perfect and there is danger in relying too heavily on any single thing. However, the title "Let's Stop Talking About 'The 30 Million Word Gap" is purposefully taking it too far (clickbait, anyone?). Ending a conversation about something that has problems t is not useful or helpful. Enriching, deepening, or resetting that conversation in the interest of addressing those problems are ideas worth exploring.

And lastly, the '30 Million Word Gap' is compelling because it tugs on our desires as educators to help, to empower students through quality learning experiences, and it also seems to provide a simple and low-cost solution. CI is compelling and essential to me because it tugs on my desires as an educator to help, to empower students through quality learning experiences, and it seems to be a low-cost solution compared with textbooks, technology tools, flipped classrooms, etc. I practice  CI because it can meet the needs of all learners and allow me to provide a rich, challenging, and differentiated curriculum. In other words, I believe it can prevent gaps in learning in a way that traditional methods cannot.

Thanks for reading - time's out for this week!