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#69123 05/07/02 02:07 PM
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NEWSWEEK for April 29 p.61 has an article about preschool kids benefitting from instruction in words and sounds as well as just having fun. Sounds good to me. One statistic that startled me was statement:pp. 63-64

"',,,children of poverty start school with a vocabulary of only 10,000 words, compared with 40,000 for kids from middle-class homes."


#69124 05/07/02 03:19 PM
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One statistic that startled me... ~ wwh

"',,,children of poverty start school with a vocabulary of only 10,000 words, compared with 40,000 for kids from middle-class homes." - Newsweek

If true, bill, it is not only startling but heartbreakingly sad and scary too.
We can only hope and pray that they catch up fast.



#69125 05/07/02 03:23 PM
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I'll bet the middle class kids are, as a rule, read to and the kids of poverty aren't.


#69126 05/07/02 03:26 PM
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Wow. That sounds unbelievable. Are you sure you got the numbers right?

I guess I would be surprised if there were high school students that had functional vocabularies in the 10s of thousands of words.


k



#69127 05/07/02 03:29 PM
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I don't doubt the 4:1 ratio, but, like FF, I can't believe the numbers are so high.

post-edit:
I tried to find the story on-line but it's now part of Newsweek's archives so you gotta pay to retrieve. Which I'm not gonna do. I'll look for it tomorrow at the library.

#69128 05/07/02 03:39 PM
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I wish the article had identified source of those figures, but it did not. I think four thousand sounds more likely for middleclass kids. I haven't any idea where to get accurate data.


#69129 05/07/02 03:54 PM
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the number sounds about right.. a 6th grade reader has a vocabulary of about 60,000 words.. about the same as a tabloid paper.. (the NY comparison is usually the NY daily news) the NY times has only a slightly higher leval, 80,000 words.. and this is a 12th grade vocabulary..

poor children get off to a poor start, and since the average person only double their vocabulary in 12 years of schooling.. starting out so far behind make it hard for kids to keep up.. they have to show a 500% increase, just to get to a 6th grade reading level, and middle class kids only have to show a 50% increase.. its an almost imposible hurdle!

its not just being read to, its general adult vocabulary, and PBS vs. commercial TV, and lots of other factors. even something as simple as a 64 crayon box of crayons--vs an 8 pack opens up a child to the idea of more colors than red,orange, yellow, green, blue and purple..

you can learn the color peacock-- and its just a name.. until you go to the zoo, and see a beautiful bird, with a head and back feathers of a dark, slightly greenish blue- peacock blue! and now the word peacock has two meanings.. or maybe, you never learn peacock, and never get to the zoo, and you life is drabber.

i still remembers some words that "opened up" like peacock... (ersatz! i learned it as term for fake cream--"the ersatz stuff" and then one day.. Voila! i realized you could have ersatz cream, or ersatz holly (euonymos, a common easy to grow ever green shrub) or ersatz intellectuals..or ersatz sugar, all of them not quite the real thing!)


#69130 05/07/02 04:32 PM
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After a long exasperating search, I finally found an article that gave a number - 20,000 words by age 6 in middle-class family. You have to scroll way down to next-to-last paragraph:

http://www.ed.gov/inits/americareads/families_talk.html


#69131 05/07/02 04:44 PM
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Excellent. Thanks for the link.


k



#69132 05/07/02 05:48 PM
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I wonder how acceptably accurate vocabulary totals can be determined. If it could be done at a rate of one word per second for ten hours, 36,000 words could be administered. But nobody could give that many responses at such a rate for so long. But if you gave the subject two seconds, it would take two days.
So, obviously, some type of sampling has to be used, and extrapolated to give total.
But, how in hell can the dependability of the sampling method the ascertained?

There is a hell of a discrepancy between the magazine's 40,000 . and the URL's 20,000.


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