Thursday, June 28, 2007
The Common Room: The Reading Gap
re: "We all know that the poor and underprivileged just don't read to their children, right? At least not as much or as often as the middle class. Right? Everybody knows that. There've been studies and everything. /Like this one: //Children from low-income households average just 25 hours of shared reading time with their parents before starting school, compared with 1,000 to 1,700 hours for their counterparts from middle-income homes. /These oft-repeated numbers originate in a 1990 book by Marilyn Jager Adams titled, "Beginning to Read: Thinking And Learning About Print." Ms. Adams got the 25-hours estimate from a study of 24 children in 22 low-income families. For the middle-income figures, she extrapolated from the experience of a single child: her then-4-year-old son, John. // How did that one study have so much influence in common knowledge, seeping down into something we all just know? Advocacy groups picked it up, worked it down to a soundbyte or two, and began trading the same piece of information back and forth with each other through the media. Carl Bialik, The Numbers Guy, explains..."...
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The original premise for Carl Bialik's WSJ "Reading Gap" story is entirely false. Marilyn Jager Adams in fact says almost the opposite of what Bialik claims she said. She never wrote the inflammatory statement he opens his piece with or anything like it.
No one every took it upon themselves before to attempt to shred her reputation because she says entirely reasonable things about reading and about the "numbers" if you look at what she actually wrote.
Given how Carl Bialik has represented Adams's work, I would not trust him as a reliable source of information about anything, especially not about how to raise my children.
The first book we got for our first-born was "Pat The Bunny", given to us at the hospital where our baby was born.
Although conversation is surely very important, research and common sense both suggest that children don't just easily learn to read if they only begin to find out about the whole process when they arrive at school. If you believe differently, I would suggest you talk to your local school primary school teachers about what they see, and use their experiences with kids who have been read to a lot, versus very little as a guide. There must be some reason that they stress the importance of early reading, other than just that Marilyn Adams said so, once, seventeen years ago.
I have written more on this topic at my own blog in a piece entitled:
"Carl Bialik: He Seems to Have Credibility, but Does It Really Exist?"
Here's the link--don't know if it will work in a comment like this. If you can't click on it, try cutting/pasting it into your browser.
http://outliarjohn.blogspot.com/2007/07/carl-bialik-he-seems-to-have.html
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