Talking your child into an education    063

Several years ago a number of teachers at a Sydney school reported something surprising: almost one third of the kindergarten children enrolling required speech therapy because of difficulties sounding out letters due to poor language skills (Bruce McDougall, Not-so-smart parenting, Daily Telegraph, 14 Jun 2014, p. 7). Other schools had also reported an increase in speech problems. According to this article, “speech specialists believe many children are starved of conversation with their family because they spend so much time on electronic devices”.

While this is an extreme outcome there are certainly large numbers of children who arrive at school with a limited vocabulary. Other children understand and are able to use far more words, and this significant educational advantage has been accrued during the few years before the start of kindergarten. And as one might expect this advantage will continue to grow as the parents of these fortunate children continue to have conversations with them.

Now before you run off to grab your child for a vocabulary lesson understand that there are plenty of opportunities for conversation and concept building during the activities of daily living. Going somewhere in the car, for example, is an obvious place, especially since most children report that travelling anywhere by car is boring. Why not play some games with the children such as counting particular types of cars, estimating distances, or even talking about things along the way. If for example you see frost on the grass or along the fences then say so. Perhaps you could explain it. At the dinner table for example you could say, “You have finished drinking one half of your milk. Please drink the other half”. At the supermarket talk about the different sizes of ice cream and involve the child in some of the decision making about purchases. From time to time you could speak a little more formally.

There is no need of course to be doing these types of things all the time, just occasionally is fine. But these small amounts of quality verbal enrichment add up and your child’s brain is desperate for this type of stimulation.

A very interesting study was carried out some time ago by the research director of the Australian Council for Educational Research, Dr Ken Rowe (reported in Linda Doherty, Excess teacher talk swamps children, Sydney Morning Herald, 23 Oct 2004, p. 3). This study of 10,000 Victorian children showed that 30 per cent of young children could not accurately process sentences longer than nine words, and for children aged nine to ten— that’s Year 4 and 5—sentences longer than 13 words could be troublesome. Parents, and teachers for that matter, need to speak more slowly, especially to boys, who apparently “process sounds more slowly and [have ears which] provide less information to the brain than the ears of girls.” The implications of all of this are very clear for the development of early literacy skills. It is something that I think parents have intuitively realised when thinking about how their boys are doing at school.

So, in summary, talk to your children whenever it’s a good time to do so. Use fairly normal everyday speech but be careful with younger children to use short sentences and to speak slowly. Just a small amount of this enrichment each day adds up to a significant and measurable educational advantage for your children. It is easy to do, costs nothing and takes almost no time. At school, the teachers will notice a difference with your children and it will also be apparent in their writing. So start giving them this head start today and then keep doing it. You have to make it a habit.

All content copyright—Mark Thackray—Australian Educational Services