The Power of Family Conversation

School matters, but literacy starts at home. Teachers armed with reading contracts and carefully worded missives have long urged parents to read aloud to their children. But now there is a second and perhaps more powerful message: Talk to your kids, too.

Mounting research that links language-rich home environments with reading success and school achievement is driving educators and community groups to target families long before children register for school. In addition to Todd Risley and Betty Hart’s landmark work correlating verbal home environments with future literacy, Catherine E. Snow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and David K. Dickinson, a professor of teaching and learning at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College, are assembling data on the impact of early literacy interventions. Their ongoing study of 57 low-income families reveals that home support for literacy markedly influences kindergarten language skills and fourth grade reading comprehension test scores. No wonder those at the leading edge of literacy want to increase the quantity and quality of conversations between parents and children beginning at birth.

“It is really what parents have been doing at home that children have to draw on when they become readers and writers,” says Gail Jordan, associate professor of education at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minn., who says children from three to five are “ripe” for engaging in rich language learning.

This is an excerpt from the Harvard Education Letter. Subscribers can click here to continue reading this article. Click here to become a subscriber.