Importance of Early Vocabulary Development

"Thirty Million Words" was the title of an article sitting in my inbox last evening as I checked email. My thought at first was that it was a typo. There are only 50,000 or so words in the English language. It was not a typo, but something entirely different. As I read I learned how important this number actually is for vocabulary development. In the mid 1990's a set of researchers set out to quantify how many words a child hears in early development and if that correlated with socioeconomic status. What they found was that there is a big "gap" in the amount of words heard by children in low income families compared to those in middle class and affluent homes. As it turned out by age four, children born into low income families hear roughly 30 million fewer words overall. Other research in the 2000's shows that this vocabulary gap then correlated to bigger gaps in learning in school with reading and comprehension. For some students their gap in achievement then becomes so big that they are never able to catch up and may drop out before graduating. 

There is hope through a new initiative called the "Thirty Million Word Initiative" or TMW-Initiative, which is a parent coaching program to help parents continue to talk and read to their children. If you are interested in learning more, please check out this quick video below about how the TMW-Initiative works or check out the website at http://tmw.org/tmw-initiative/:

Additional Resources:

http://www.npr.org/2013/12/29/257922222/closing-the-word-gap-between-rich-and-p