Early Intervention Strategies for Language Acquisition Success

1. Home-based Activities Building Language Acquisition Virginia Mann Founder and Director Professor of Cognitive Sciences, Univ. of Calif., Irvine HABLA: http://www.socsci.uci.edu/habla/ Email: vmann@uci.edu

2. The 2000 census targets Santa Ana: • Highest drop-out rate • Largest proportion of Spanish speakers

3. Some consequences of not finishing school: • Less income:37 cents for every dollar earned by someone with a diploma • A shorter life:dying on average, 9 years earlier than graduates • Only a 1% decrease in the dropout rate, nationwide could: • lead to 100,000 fewer crimes (including 400 fewer murders) • a savings of $1.4 million annually LA Times 1/29/06

4. What can be Done? • Improve the schools • High school matriculation relates to • Class size • Teacher education • Improve the pipeline! • Work with younger children • Work before kindergarten starts • Even Start, State preschool programs and HABLA

5. Poverty and children’s language environment • A key study by Hart and Risely: Meaningful Differences (1995) • 42 children studied in their homes • Language of parent(s) to child sampled monthly between 1 and 3 yrs • Children from welfare families compared to those from upper class professional families, and working class families

6. Oral Language to Young Children(Hart and Risley 1995)

7. A culture of silence

8. A culture of negative words: SHHHHHHH!!!!

9. The Dire Facts Poverty associates with weak language environment • Welfare parents use fewer words per hour • Each year, this means a child: • in a professional family hears 11 million words • in a welfare family would hear just 3 million • By age 5 welfare children have heard 32 million fewer words • The are language impoverished

11. For the child, this leads to: • Weak vocabularies • 5,000 word vocabularies instead of 20,000 • By age 3: • the spoken vocabularies of the children from the professional families • were larger than those used by the parents in the welfare families.

12. For the child-- • Weak speaking and listening skills • Weak cognitive skills • Early math development depends upon language input • Foundations for science and other academic subjects also depend upon language as a medium of input

13. HABLA Research: A bottleneck in the pipeline Disadvantaged children in Santa Ana begin with slightly lower language skills but soon fall far behind – even in Spanish! Normal At risk

14. A Cautionary Note The danger of ‘greenhouse effects’ Makes early intervention a mandate!

15. Other consequences can spread beyond language • Weak social skills • communicating and negotiating • conflict resolution • Low esteem • Lack of positive regard associates with personality deviance • Lack of a need for achievement • parents have low aspirations and pass on a sense of hopelessness

16. What can be done? • How to correct the deficit? • When to start? • What to do? • Where to do it? • What language to use?

17. Almost Thirty Years of Research Targets 3 Strategies

18. 1. Exercise Spoken Language • Encourage Language Use in: • Production -- speaking • Comprehension -- listening • Complex vocabulary, rich grammar, not baby talk

19. 2. Enrich the Literacy Environment Use children’s books and share reading activities to expose children to: • Complex Vocabulary • Stories • Songs • Nursery Rhymes Engage in dialogic reading • i.e. having a two-way conversation around a book

20. 3. Develop ‘Phonological Awareness’ • Readers do more than speak a language • they appreciate the sounds within words as something separate from meaning • What is a ‘long word’? snake or caterpillar • What two words start with the same sound? cat, dog, cup • Realizing that letters stand for phonemes is an important part of what reading the English alphabet is all about • Using letters to write morphemes is also very critical but plays more of a role for children beyond grade 3

21. Examples of phonological awareness activities: Word play that involves comparing identifying, and manipulating ‘sounds’ within words • Nursery rhymes and poems (these compare and manipulate rhyming words and words that start with the same sounds) • Word games (E.g. ‘Willowby-wallaby’; these often manipulate phonemes) • Learning letter names and sounds (these identify phonemes)

22. Make it age appropriate! Mastering Phonological Awareness takes time

23. How to achieve these three strategies ? • Two new programs at UCI: Home-based Activities Building Language Acquisition School-based mentoring for language enrichment

24. HABLA’s Answer: • Replicating some practices of the “Parent-Child Home Program” : • Provide two years of home visits, twice per week for a total of 46 weeks • Increase verbal interaction between parents and their 2-4 year old children • Use easily learned, fun methods • Give books and toys that stay in the home

25. The PCHP Philosophy: • Help parents realize their role as children’s first and most important teachers • Coach parents to provide positive reinforcement, using developmentally appropriate materials that will engender higher self esteem

26. HABLA’s 3 innovations to PCHP: • Use SPANISH, the language of the home, and supply high quality materials in that language • Use culturally appropriate mentors as coaches and role models to the family • Include activities to boost cognitive development (math, science) while language is being remediated

27. HABLA as Cost Effective: • 1 year of HABLA: $2000 • 1 year of preschool: $6000 • An extra year of school: $6000 • Each year of Special Education: $12,000 • Cumulative loss of social capital: PRICELESS • Less income tax, increased health and welfare costs, lost potential

28. The Home Visitors • Culturally competent • Community paraprofessionals • UCI students • AmeriCorps members • Native speakers of Spanish • Trained prior to visits and during service, and supervised by Site Coordinators: • Maricela Sandova Lorena Garcia, and David Calderon

29. An HABLA mom who is now a home visitor….

30. The Clientele • Two-year olds whose parents are: • Educationally disadvantaged • Financially disadvantaged • Primary caretaker must participate, by being present and involved in every session • Visit 1: parent observes use of book/toy • Visit 2: uses book/toy with child and receives further coaching

31. One of our Families

32. Another of our Families

33. Home Visits

34. The Toys and Books • Developmentally appropriate • Colorful and fun • Promote both listening and speaking and hands on activities • In the Language of the home • With tip sheets in Spanish that are left for the parents

35. Some Examples • Books: • Where’s Spot • Is Your Mama a Lama • Our ‘HABLA Rimas’ book of familiar Spanish nursery songs and rhymes and their English translations • Toys • ‘Moody Bear’ puzzle • Shape and color sorter

36. Measuring the Outcome: • Spanish language assessment at program intake and at the end of each year • “The Preschool Language Scale”: • A scaled, age-adjusted measure of receptive and productive language • Available in Spanish or English

37. Positive Gains for the Children: A “Promising Practice” Without HABLA

38. New data: HABLA graduates attending Warwick Preschool 2002-2007

39. PLS Results for Warwick cohort during their HABLA treatment

40. Basic Skills in Preschool:Letter Knowledge HABLA English Spanish

41. Basic Skills in Preschool:Mathematics HABLA English Spanish

42. Basic Skills in Preschool:Colors and Shapes HABLA Spanish English

43. More outcome assessment: Kindergarten at Kennedy Elementary • Parent survey of home literacy activities • The Preschool language scale • Spanish at onset of school year • Phonological awareness • English at end of year

44. Parent Survey

45. Spanish PLS-III Total Language Score

46. English Phoneme Judgment Control HABLA

47. English Phoneme Substitution Control HABLA

48. Review and Conclusions:Some dire observations • Poverty weak language environments • Weak language environment weak language and cognition

49. Thus poor children enter school at a disadvantage • For ESL children: this is a double whammy • weak primary language limits secondary language development as well as cognitive growth

50. But home visitation offers some promising results • Home environments can improve • Parents can be coached to provide more language and literacy stimulation • This may take a time and effort • But produces a real and lasting advantage for school success