"children of poverty start school with a vocabulary of only 10,000 words, compared with 40,000 for kids from middle-class homes."
I still question the validity of those 40,000 word vocabulary estimates. (guess-timates)
A wise question. The following by Sebastian Wren, Ph.D. (not further identified) differs from all of the conflicting numbers noted in this thread:
By the time a child enters school, that child has learned between 2,500 and 5,000 words. For the first few years of formal education, an average child will learn about 3,000 new words per year. That's 8 words per day!
.....However, these numbers describe averages. Some children enter school knowing as much as twice the number of words that their peers know. This discrepancy in vocabulary size correlates very strongly with reading achievement. Further, once a child becomes a successful reader, text becomes the primary source of vocabulary development. Thus, as years of education pass, the discrepancy between the vocabulary size of some students over their peers can grow from two-fold to over four-fold."
Elsewhere the same author makes the point more generally (and also gives us a new term): Research has revealed an extremely dangerous phenomenon that has been dubbed the "Matthew Effect." The term comes from the line in the Bible that essentially says that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Over time, the gap between children who have well developed literacy skills and those who do not gets wider and wider. (emphasis added)
The latter article, titled "Ten Myths of Reading Instruction", appear to be very interesting; admittedly I have not read it thoroughly.
[Note for links: The links have characters which prohibit "makeashorterlink" from functioning properly. I omit them, lest your screens go wide. To find them, just google-searches snippets of the quoted language
