Examining Early Language and Literacy Development in an Impoverished Community
In the fall of 2016, I enrolled in and completed an honors seminar titled Examining Early Language and Literacy Development in an Impoverished Community. Taught by Dr. Lesley Raisor-Becker, the purpose of this course was to examine the relationship between early literacy development, and generational poverty. It also did it’s best to make the issues faced by the areas and children we were examining personal and relatable by combining classroom sessions with a series of volunteering sessions with a community Head Start program. For this course, we used the text “A Framework for Understanding Poverty 4th Edition, by Ruby Payne. While this text is often criticized for it’s lack of empirical evidence for its claims, this criticism was something that we took into account and examined the claims with when reading.
Over the course of the semester, we were required to complete 5 volunteering session at the Millvale Head Start program by Ethel Taylor academy. While there, we were practicing a type of reading with the children called dialogic reading. The goal was to ask leading questions to the children in such a way that they were forced to make inferences and connections that weren’t immediately apparent in order to give the correct answer. The intended result of this was to train their critical thinking skills, particularly in relation to context clues and language. I felt like I learned a lot from these sessions, as they helped me to observe some the things that we were discussing in the classroom in real life.
The biggest thing that I’ve taken away from this seminar is that learning and education are much more than just the teachers a school has, or the amount of funding they receive. One major focus of the seminar was that much of a child’s early language development comes from home, especially with reading. Being read to by, or reading with adults is the best way for a child to develop their language skills. While we learned that reading language can carry into spoken, it’s much harder for the opposite to occur. However, this problem is exasperated in impoverished communities because they don’t have the same freedom of time that a more well off neighborhood might. Even something as simple as having a car to take to work, or needing to take the bus can mean an extra 1-2 hours in a parents day to interact with or read to their child. Although I do think we need to increase funding and teacher training in impoverished areas, we also need to focus on building communities in impoverished areas. Places like the Harlem Children’s Zone, or special schools like Promise Academy allow for more time to be devoted to each child, which is what many of them are lacking. This isn’t something that will happen on it’s own; This is something that we have to facilitate ourselves in order to fix the horrible state of education that currently exists in our country.
Over the course of the semester, we were required to complete 5 volunteering session at the Millvale Head Start program by Ethel Taylor academy. While there, we were practicing a type of reading with the children called dialogic reading. The goal was to ask leading questions to the children in such a way that they were forced to make inferences and connections that weren’t immediately apparent in order to give the correct answer. The intended result of this was to train their critical thinking skills, particularly in relation to context clues and language. I felt like I learned a lot from these sessions, as they helped me to observe some the things that we were discussing in the classroom in real life.
The biggest thing that I’ve taken away from this seminar is that learning and education are much more than just the teachers a school has, or the amount of funding they receive. One major focus of the seminar was that much of a child’s early language development comes from home, especially with reading. Being read to by, or reading with adults is the best way for a child to develop their language skills. While we learned that reading language can carry into spoken, it’s much harder for the opposite to occur. However, this problem is exasperated in impoverished communities because they don’t have the same freedom of time that a more well off neighborhood might. Even something as simple as having a car to take to work, or needing to take the bus can mean an extra 1-2 hours in a parents day to interact with or read to their child. Although I do think we need to increase funding and teacher training in impoverished areas, we also need to focus on building communities in impoverished areas. Places like the Harlem Children’s Zone, or special schools like Promise Academy allow for more time to be devoted to each child, which is what many of them are lacking. This isn’t something that will happen on it’s own; This is something that we have to facilitate ourselves in order to fix the horrible state of education that currently exists in our country.
