An interesting three part experiment with children from low-income and middle-income families showed the importance of vocabulary for all pupils in developing their comprehension.
In the first experiment Professor Susan Neuman and colleagues assessed childrens’ background knowledge about birds by creating a task with fictional characters and names. “This is a toma. A toma is a bird. Can a toma live in a nest?” and other items in a similar format. As predicted, low-income children had significantly more limited background knowledge than their middle-income peers.
They then created a storybook that featured the adventures of four types of birds. After the reading, they asked children to make causal inferences about the story, and once again, found the low-SES children scored significantly lower than the middle income children.
‘In our third experiment we neutralized background knowledge by introducing a storybook narrative that would include a novel topic to both groups of children. The storybook used a novel category (i.e., wugs, a pseudoword) and was designed around the adventures of four species of wugs. Here was our reasoning: If children’s preexisting background knowledge underlies these differences in comprehension, then we would expect that there would be no differences in learning among our differing SES groups.
‘And our results confirmed our hypothesis: Low-income and middle-income children scored similarly in word learning, comprehension, and the ability to make inferences.
‘In other words, the differences between groups were not in the skills associated with comprehension e.g., inferencing but in the knowledge to make these words
comprehensible.’
In summary, vocabulary matters for all pupils, regardless of prior attainment or background.
If you’d like to catch up with my recent reading webinar, you can click the link below.
Until next time
Mary