research
The following research reveals the importance of oral language development, the apparent gap among students and its affect on achievement.
- Bringing Words to Life: Graves and others state: "First-grade children from higher-SES groups knew about twice as many words as lower SES children" (as cited in Beck, et al, 2002, p. 1)
- A report from The Foundation of Literacy from Rhode Island: "...children find it difficult to think without proficient oral language" (Eisenhart, 2007). "Children arrive in kindergarten with huge discrepancies in oral language development ... and the gap between language-advanced and language-delayed children grows throughout the elementary school years" (Biemiller, 2001). "The spoken and the unspoken taken together constitute meaning. Without this relevant, unspoken background knowledge, we can’t understand text" (Hirsch, 2006).
- From Reading Rockets website- "Dialogic Reading: An Effective Way to Read to Preschoolers," by Grover J. (Russ) Whitehurst: "Over a third of children in the U.S. enter school unprepared to learn. They lack the vocabulary, sentence structure, and other basic skills that are required to do well in school. Children who start behind generally stay behind – they drop out, they turn off. Their lives are at risk."
- Lenses on Reading by Diane H. Tracey and Lesley Mandel Morrow, page 119: "Sociolinguistic theorists who study reading believe that oral language is the foundation upon which children's reading and writing achievement is built (Apel & Masterson, 2001; Snow, Burns & Griffin, 1998). As such, oral language knowledge provides children with an intuitive understanding of the structure of language, (i.e., its syntax) that helps them predict text and read fluently at a later age."