Evaluating Language Curricula for Preschool Children

Abstract

There are some linguists who maintain that children from culturally disadvantaged homes are not, per se, language handicapped; that they have a functionally complete, although perhaps different, language system of their own. Whether or not this is true from a linguistic point of view is relatively immaterial to educators, who are faced with the high incidence of school failure among these linguistically different children. There is no doubt that in almost every measure of verbal ability, visual and auditory discrimination, and other cognitive and perceptual skills closely related to successful performance in academic tasks, children from the culture of poverty score significantly below those from middle-class homes. Because a set of variables can be shown to covary in a dependable relationship under a given set of circumstances does not necessarily mean that the modification of one will produce a predictable change in the other. The danger of drawing inferences of causality from correlational data has often been noted in the literature. In addition, Edmund Gordon (1965) has pointed out that correlational studies offer no guidelines for planning intervention procedures and may be harmful in that they provide a spurious statistical basis for a popular mythology. However, the evidence from psychological studies convincingly demonstrates that the ability to perform logical operations, reason inferentially, and extract generalizations from the abstract manipulation of experience is intrinsically tied to the mediational function of language. Research evidence indicates that language deficit characterizes children from low-income homes and that the deficit is greatest in those uses of language most closely related to cognitive behavior. These phenomena are not idiosyncratic to the United States-for instance, in Israel, where there is a merging of people from European and Near Eastern countries, similar