Vocabulary Achievement Gaps

According to Sanford Graduate School of Education research, almost every school district enrolling large numbers of low-income studies has an average academic performance significantly below the national-grade level average. Achievement gaps are larger in districts where black and Hispanic students attend higher poverty schools than their white peers. The size of the gaps has little or no association with average class size. The most and least socioeconomically advantaged districts have average performance levels more than four grade levels apart. According to Reardon and colleagues, one-sixth of all students attend public school in school districts where average test scores are more than a grade level below the national average. Also, one-sixth

he most fundamental responsibility of schools is teaching students to read. Indeed, the future success of all students hinges upon their ability to become proficient readers. Recent scientific studies have allowed us to understand more than ever before how literacy develops, why some children have difficulty, and what constitutes best instructional practice. Scientists now estimate that fully 95 percent of all children can be taught to read. Yet, in spite of all our knowledge, statistics reveal an alarming prevalence of struggling and poor readers that is not limited to any one segment of society:

Going through life we learn and grow differently in literacy. As a young child, I started off my reading by looking at pictures and then grew into more difficult literacy. Trying to comprehend how much reading would impact my life in the future when I was little, was something I never understood. Being in high school now, I have learned how much reading and writing would impact me and how many opportunities it could provide for me. Since I was that child who could have cared less about my literacy, I soon became the child that got so worked up if I wasn’t as superb as others in reading. Throughout my childhood, my literacy has had its ups and downs, but now being in high school I have worked hard in my literacy which has allowed me to take

Respond to prompts 4a–c below by referring to children’s range of vocabulary development related to the learning segment—What do they know, what are they struggling with, and/or what is new to them?

The importance of decreasing this test score gap is essential because the No Child Left Behind legislation mandates that all students make annual progress toward reaching mastery in the core subjects of reading, math, science and social studies. Additionally in Texas, schools are rated based partially on the annual progress of subpopulations on campus. In the absence of a socio-economic disparity, more study needs to be done on ways that African-American students can become more successful at increasingly elevating their level of performance on state mandated tests. Explicit instruction is an important part of vocabulary acquisition. According to Harmon (1998) directly teaching vocabulary can assist with reading comprehension when students are taught to integrate new words with their

The authors describe their early work during President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty initiative of the 1960’s, which focused on the early acquisition of language among preschool children. The children were engaged with activities designed to broaden their vocabularies and the researchers used this data to evaluate their language growth and to compare the language growth of children in the program who were of a low socio-economic standing with preschool children of professors who taught at the University of Kansas. Hart and Todd found that the increases in the vocabulary of the children of poverty, although initially encouraging, were distressingly, short-lived. Although the children could be taught new words, the rate at which the new vocabulary

Despite the fact that Meaningful Difference was written in 1995, Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley findings are both good and bad news story. Often uneducated parents can supply children with the experience for a healthy intellectual development, while educated parents cannot supply their children with a healthy intellectual development. Parents who do not provide their child with experience, making up for the deficiency with remedial programs is impossible. An earlier study by, Hart and Risley compared the vocabulary development of preschool youngsters from a poor neighborhood with that of children whose parents were university faculty member. Upon doing the study they found

This literacy gap affects students’ abilities to access core textbooks and communicate and write effectively within the various subject areas. The literacy gap catches up to many of our students as they enter high school and feel overwhelmed by the challenges of increasing academic standards and more difficult vocabulary. Because they not only lack the language that will help them access and understand their classes, many students struggle with content-area reading and writing in these subjects. This could be an easy fix if the instructors that stood before these students were able to take the mastery of their content and adapt it as it deems appropriate for the young minds they are partly responsible for. Children who lack the academic language of school struggle to meet literacy requirements, and they often feel overwhelmed in the classroom. This is just the beginning of the spiral because once the students have met that stage of being overwhelmed, they often begin thinking of the short term way of dealing with this, which could be anything from completely giving up and having the grades that show this or actually dropping out.

In the New York Times article from 2013 titled Public Policy, Made to Fit People, Richard H. Thaler addresses the issues surrounding education and the vocabulary gap between children of middle-class and above families, versus that of poor families. In this article, Thaler claims that at the early age of three years old, children who come from middle class families have roughly double the vocabulary span of their poor counterparts.

at home and first we need to make sure we close the gap they have with fluent bilingual language speakers.In the article, Missing in Action: Vocabulary Instruction in Pre-K,Neuman and Dwyer (2009)highlight the correlation between early vocabulary and future academic success. It confirms research which demonstrates how the students that had the most vocabulary by the age of 4 were the ones that received the highest scores in the upper grades. Since some of our bilingual students have not been engaged in an extensive vocabulary we need to provide very intense and focused instruction to ensure future academic success.We need to educate the parents on the importance of talking to their children and teaching them vocabulary regardless of the language.

Harold Hodgkinson (1999), a noted demographer, labels poverty as the “universal handicap,” with social class more important than race. Poverty is a reality in our world, and they are a lot of children that are affected by it. Low-income children have a hard time learning how to read because they do not have the necessary support at home. Most of this kid’s parents, work 2-3 jobs to provide their children with a house, food, etc. Since the teacher can control this situations happening at home, she/he needs to find ways to help the student in the classroom. However, this doesn’t mean that low-income parents do not care about their kid’s education. Most of them do value literacy, they just do not have the extra time to help their kids at home.

This paper explores related research in aspects of language acquisition, specifically, reading instruction and its effect on students who live in low socioeconomic environments. We will review the methods of explicit phonics and whole language to examine what, if any, is the more advantageous method of reading instruction for students who live in poverty. The purpose of this literature review is to investigate the impacts of specific reading instruction on the literacy development of children and how socioeconomics restricts these impacts. The research reviewed was collected from peer review journals using the Central Search feature on the UCO Chambers Library website. The majority of the researcher’s findings came from EBSCOhost Education Research Complete and JSTOR: Journal Storage. Given the findings of this literature review, research suggests that explicit phonics instruction, when embedded in a whole language classroom, promotes growth in literacy skills among young children. Research suggests that multisensory phonics, based on Orton-Gillingham Approach, promotes literacy growth for students who are at-risk, however, its impact within a whole language classroom are undetermined. This literature review suggests that multisensory phonics should be utilized in a whole language classroom to determine if its use promotes growth in

Reading is a skill often taken for granted but it is essential in order to progress in life. For a child being able to read well helps them learn new things, give ideas and enables use of imagination. National literacy trust (2015) suggests that children’s early language skills can have a major impact on a child’s development of literacy skills. Five-year olds with poor language and literacy have a higher risk of underachieving at age seven and beyond. Reading skills encourage more opportunities in life and it can affect a child’s wellbeing if they do not achieve this effectively (Finnegan,2015).

Reading – the ability to represent the sounds of language by written symbols has existed for approximately 4000 to 5000 years and is inarguably one of the most fundamental and wonderful technique humans have ever developed. However, despite much effort and funding dedicating to wide literacy development, even now in America for instance, 50% of adults cannot read a book written at an eighth grade level (National Center for Learning Disabilities). In order for the entire population of today’s society to have proper reading skills, scholars and educators around the world realize that literacy movements need to focus on much earlier stages of human development. Researchers in the education field have reached a consensus that reading is crucial in childhood by revealing supporting evidence from studies focused on children aged 0-6 years, 6-12, and young adolescents. Many interesting findings also include that reading proficiency of children is critical because it can reflect society’s criminal and economical status. Moreover, modern studies show that the importance of childhood reading cannot be fully explained without mentioning the environment where children are raised, as the environment greatly affects children’s reading proficiency.

When data from students who had average accuracy and fluency scores, but lower comprehension scores were compared to data from those with similar accuracy and fluency but average comprehension, the consistent differences were found to be lower oral language and vocabulary skills in the poor comprehenders upon entry into formal schooling. (Nation, Cocksey, Taylor & Bishop) Thousands of dollars each year are spent on intervention, trying to improve the reading of children that show delays. When one reads, the clear goal is comprehension of what is read. Without communication of ideas between the author and reader, decoding texts is pointless. Most intervention programs are focused on phonics and word decoding. Oral language interventions concurrent with vocabulary and comprehension tasks at age eight have been shown to lead to significant improvements in reading comprehension. (Nation, et al., 2010). Reading comprehension is not merely a product of being able to decode words and sentences. How we teach children to process and integrate the ideas found in text can have a large impact on their ability to function in a world of ever expanding knowledge and information.