Developing Lanuage

Hart and Risely

This article focuses mainly on the development of language of children from different economic environments. In particular, it focuses on the experience of words during early childhood. There is a large gap of the number of words children are exposed to by the age of four. Children coming from upper socioeconomic status have experienced up to thirty million more words by the age of four then children living in a welfare family.  It also states that the gap seems to grow as the children get older. This is a good reminder to educators that there a lot of factors that affect a child’s life before schooling even begins and that many of these factors are out of our control. It is important to remember as an educator, that every student is different.  I would have liked to see a little more results regarding the middle classes. It also seems that this study was a bit skewed due to the fact that they were only able to gather info from families that were willing to cooperate. There are many factors that could alter a child’s language development regardless of socioeconomic status.

Since my focus is mathematics, I found myself often wondering just how this study would affect mathematics language development. Most words used in mathematics have a good chance of never being experienced until introduced in a classroom, regardless of socioeconomic status. I am curious to see just how much early childhood language development affects the ability to learn mathematics vocabulary in school.