Abstract
Welcome to kindergarten! The bright red and yellow banner, dimmed by the low light in the room, broadcasted on the wall. The room was dead silent, and it smelled of stale lunch meat. There were children, about 20 of them—all inert. The faint winter afternoon rays of the desert sun came through the purple-y-tinted plexiglass window. A young but listless woman, the teacher, was sitting in a rocking chair. She rocked back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Finally, she broke the quiet and in a soft, monotone voice and began chanting unintelligible sounds as if in a trance. “Pppp-lllllaaaa-tteeee-pusss: Platypus!” she uttered with a sudden burst of enthusiasm. The dazed children, most of whom were emergent bilinguals (Spanish-English), sat up straight and, in a Siri-like choir, tried to repeat after the teacher. And so on and on it went: One sound after another, one syllable after another, one word after another.
The excerpt above was taken from field notes during a kindergarten classroom observation late last year. Holding a firm belief that children living in poverty need to “have” more words, the school principal—like many in his district—had adopted a vocabulary program that aimed at leveling academic disparities of students from economically impoverished backgrounds by remediating the so-called “word gap” (also known as the “language gap”). The concept of the language gap has its roots in a commonly cited study by Hart and Risley (1995) who argue that by the age of 3 years, children from affluent households are exposed to approximately 30 million more words than children from low-income families. The authors claim that this “word gap” is largely responsible for the low academic achievement. Although linguists, anthropologists, and educators alike agree that these findings carry intrinsically problematic assumptions about linguistic quality and quantity (see Avineri et al., 2015). Nonetheless, according to Google Scholar, in the last couple of years, Hart and Risley’s (1995) article has been cited more than 670 times. In addition, the concept of a language gap has received renewed attention with the proliferation of public media coverage such as a recent New Yorker article, “The Talking Cure” (Talbot, 2015), and an National Public Radio (NPR; 2013) program, “Closing the Word Gap Between Rich and Poor,” which have given rise to political as well as educational initiatives and instructional practices such as the one illustrated at the beginning of this editorial.
A disproportionate number of ethnic minorities, especially African American, Latinos, and Native Americans, live in poverty and have a record of lower academic achievement; however, the subtle and dangerous argument embedded in the language gap rhetoric is that poor people of color can be bundled into the category of “language deficient. In addition to its pernicious effects in schools and questionable scientific veracity, this concept argument is also problematic as it presents a “deficit” view of parenting, taking White middle-class approaches as the unchallenged norm and focuses only on what poor families of color are not doing in relation to that norm. In Blum, Avineri, and Johnson’s (2015) response to a recent article in the Washington Post (Layton, 2015), the authors problematize the claims that differences in child-rearing styles are equivalent to deprivation. They go on to say that children who are not coached by their parents in the same way as middle-class White children may nonetheless have substantial verbal skills in the dimension of narrative, language play, bi-, multi-, or translanguaging, and other appropriate forms of interaction. Thus, the perhaps well-intentioned plans to give poor children and families of color “more words” overlooks many of the other ways that language works in the world—ways that are subtle, powerful, and completely intertwined with notions of family and community and all of what binds them together.
It is disturbing to us that 35 years after Stephen J. Gould’s (1981) classic, lucid exposé, The Mismeasure of Man, that insidious biases in measurement continue to be promoted, primarily by privileged White researchers who continually seek to rank and diminish populations different from themselves. The result of these biases is that poor children still remain the target of administrative and instructional practices, which more wealthy populations of parents would never tolerate—unfortunately abetted by research in the field which fails to search for linguistic and cognitive strengths in less economically situated communities. As scholars in the field, instead of focusing literacy research on the need for increasing the word banks for children who struggle academically, we propose redirecting this scholarship to focus on the ways students and families from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds can uniquely contribute to this conversation with their own richness of language resources (González, Moll, & Amanti, 2005; Paris & Alim, 2014). Approached in this way, we might also be reminded that language is not only a code to be transferred or collected, but it is the very tool we, as humans, use to relate to one another, to define personal identities, and to share cultural inheritance.