THE LANGUAGE SCRIPTS OF PRE-SCHOOL CHILDREN AND OF THE LANGUAGE INTERVENTION VOLUNTEER: MISMATCHED DISCOURSES?

Frenette Southwood,Eden D'Oliveira

doi:10.5842/49-0-659

Abstract

Children with low socioeconomic status (SES) often enter school with poor language skills (Raizada, Richards, Meltzoff and Kuhl 2008), and fall further behind their middle-class peers with every passing grade (cf. Cunningham and Stanovich 1997). This frequently results in academic failure and premature school exit (Astone and McLanahan 1991; Catts, Fey, Tomblin and Zhang 2002), which perpetuates the cycle of limited life chances. Early intervention is often recommended for these children in an attempt to render them less vulnerable to such academic failure. This study considers the practice of such early language intervention. It reflects on the lessons learnt from a language stimulation programme implemented by a dedicated volunteer in a childcare centre in an isolated farming valley in the Stellenbosch area. Some children attending this centre received deliberate language stimulation in a small-group setting on a weekly basis for 18 weeks spread over 6 months. Formal pre- and post-intervention language test scores indicated limited gains for this group, with no statistically significant differences (i) between the group’s pre- and post-stimulation scores or (ii) between those children who received the language stimulation and those who did not. Although other, difficult-to-measure gains could be observed (such as increased confidence in interaction with the volunteer, better class participation, and increased positive risk-taking), the stimulation programme failed to yield statistically significant improvement in language skills. The question arises as to why this is the case: Would the children have shown significant improvement over a longer period of time? Is the formal language test inappropriate for use with these children? Or should the practice of a middle-class volunteer entering these children’s low-SES world be reconsidered? The paper considers the apparent failure of early language intervention to achieve its goal, namely to give linguistically under-prepared children a fair chance at participating in classroom discourse.

Highlights

Language competence and proficiency are key determinants of literacy development and general educational success (Scarborough 2001; Snow, Burns and Griffin 1998; VernonFeagans 1996; Vernon-Feagans, Scheffner Hammer, Miccio and Manlove 2002)
As argued by Tough (1982:6, in reference to the results of her 1977 study), “the children of parents with educational advantage more frequently used language to analyse and reflect on present and past experiences, to reason and justify, to predict and consider alternative possibilities, to talk about events in the future, to project into the lives and feelings of others, and to build up scenes, events and stories in the imagination”. This is the type of language use the volunteer would have demonstrated as a child, and this might have been the type of language use that she would have assumed the children in the language stimulation group to be capable of
This paper considers the apparent failure of early language intervention to achieve its goal, namely to develop the language skills of linguistically under-prepared children to such an extent that they will have a fair chance at participating in classroom discourse

Summary

Introduction

Language competence and proficiency are key determinants of literacy development and general educational success (Scarborough 2001; Snow, Burns and Griffin 1998; VernonFeagans 1996; Vernon-Feagans, Scheffner Hammer, Miccio and Manlove 2002). Intervention is often recommended to improve the language skills of children from lowSES backgrounds (cf Knudsen, Heckman, Cameron and Shonkoff 2006) in an attempt to render these children less vulnerable to academic failure and to increase access to better post-school opportunities Examples of such programmes include Babytalk, HighScope, Sure Start, and the well-known Head Start program. South African children from low-SES backgrounds generally have alarmingly low literacy levels (Mullis, Martin, Foy and Drucker 2012), which are attributed to poor language skills (Klop and Tuomi 2007), as well as to large classes and overfilled classrooms, a lack of resources, a shortage of trained teachers, and poor pre-literacy skills (Klop and Tuomi 2007:59; cf Muijs, Harris, Chapman, Stoll and Russ 2009). The language scripts of pre-school children and of the language intervention volunteer 251 and literacy acquisition problems of children with low SES who enter school with poorlydeveloped language skills

Early intervention for poorly-developed language skills

Does the problem lie with a mismatch between the volunteer and the community?

Findings

Concluding remarks