Virginia Mann

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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_at_uci.edu

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The 2000 census targets Santa Ana

• Highest drop-out rate
• Largest proportion of Spanish speakers

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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
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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

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Poverty and childrens 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

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Oral Language to Young Children (Hart and
Risley 1995)
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A culture of silence
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A culture of negative words SHHHHHHH!!!!
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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

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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.

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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

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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
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A Cautionary Note

The danger of greenhouse effects Makes early
intervention a mandate!
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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

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What can be done?

• How to correct the deficit?
• When to start?
• What to do?
• Where to do it?
• What language to use?

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Almost Thirty Years of Research Targets 3
Strategies

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1. Exercise Spoken Language

• Encourage Language Use in
• Production -- speaking
• Comprehension -- listening
• Complex vocabulary, rich grammar, not baby talk

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2. Enrich the Literacy Environment

• Use childrens 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

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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

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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)

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Make it age appropriate! Mastering Phonological
Awareness takes time
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How to achieve these three strategies ?

• Two new programs at UCI
• Home-based Activities Building Language
  Acquisition
• School-based mentoring for language enrichment

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HABLAs 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

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The PCHP Philosophy

• Help parents realize their role as childrens
  first and most important teachers
• Coach parents to provide positive reinforcement,
  using developmentally appropriate materials that
  will engender higher self esteem

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HABLAs 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

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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

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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

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An HABLA mom who is now a home visitor.
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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

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One of our Families

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Another of our Families

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Home Visits

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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

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Some Examples

• Books
• Wheres 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

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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

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Positive Gains for the Children A Promising
Practice
Without HABLA
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New data HABLA graduates attending Warwick
Preschool 2002-2007
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PLS Results for Warwick cohort during their HABLA
treatment
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Basic Skills in PreschoolLetter Knowledge
HABLA
English
Spanish
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Basic Skills in PreschoolMathematics
HABLA
English
Spanish
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Basic Skills in PreschoolColors and Shapes
HABLA
Spanish
English
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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

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Parent Survey
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Spanish PLS-III Total Language Score
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English Phoneme Judgment
Control HABLA
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English Phoneme Substitution
Control HABLA
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Review and ConclusionsSome dire observations

• Poverty
• weak language environments
• Weak language environment
• weak language and cognition

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• 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

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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

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Parents speaking and reading with their
children, children who enter school ready to learn