With babies, words for wisdom

City urges parents to nourish young minds with talk

Literacy worker Lydia Soto with Ky'Lee Santos, 6 months, caressed (below) by her dad, Jose. (photos by david l. ryan/globe staff)

The advice is simple: Talk to your children as much as possible. It's a recommendation that many parents might take for granted, but one that Boston educators are trying to spread to low-income families to give their youngsters a better shot at school.

Literacy coaches have begun fanning out among housing developments in the city, urging parents of infants and toddlers to embrace the unnatural role of a sportscaster. They should narrate a play-by-play of their actions, the coaches say, while bathing and dressing their little ones, riding the bus with them, preparing meals, and running errands - even if the babies respond with nothing more than a blink, smile, or coo.

The goal is to close the gap in achievement between low-income students and their middle-class peers, who generally are exposed to a much greater number of words at an early age. The more words young children hear, research has shown, the easier it will be for them to read and write as they grow. Watching television does not count.

"You might think you sound ridiculous and look like an idiot, but comment on everything," literacy coach Cathy Craddock told a small group of parents last week at a community center in Charlestown, the first neighborhood targeted by the city for a series of workshops.

Craddock and a partner will visit a recently formed play group at the community center during the next four months as part of the city's effort to help parents increase the amount of verbal communication with young children. The $550,000, three-year initiative, called Early Words, is run by ReadBoston, a citywide literacy program, and funded by Staples. The workshops are part of a wider school-readiness strategy launched by the city this year.

At the Charlestown workshop, four parents sat cross-legged around an alphabet rug as Craddock and another literacy coach, Rachel Hess, demonstrated the best ways to speak to young children.

Instead of hushing a child who is clamoring for attention, the coaches said, parents should make an effort to describe and label what is going on. When getting a child ready to play outside, for example, parents should be sure to talk about the blue hat they are looking for, the warm jacket they are zipping the child into, and the stuffed sausage the bundled child resembles.

Do it in English. Do it in Spanish. It doesn't matter what language parents use to talk to their children, as long as they're talking, researchers say. Even a child whose native language is not English will have an easier time learning English in school if the child already has a wide vocabularly.

All that talk in the early years will bolster reading comprehension by the time the children reach the third grade, according to academic research. Program officials hope that the children of parents who are exposed to the city's training will be reading on grade level by that point.

In Boston, only a quarter of low-income third-graders were proficient in reading, compared with half of middle-class students, according to 2007 MCAS results.

A groundbreaking study published in 1995 by Betty Hart, professor emeritus of human development at the University of Kansas, and the late Todd Risley, who taught psychology at the University of Alaska, showed that by age 3, most middle-class children had much larger vocabularies than children from low-income families. Middle-class parents speak, on average, 300 more words per hour to their children, according to the study. The vocabulary gap at age 3 correlated with language scores in the third grade.

Low-income parents are also less likely to acknowledge their children's conversational initiatives and more likely to use words like no, shut up, and stop, the research showed.

But the literacy coaches didn't mention any of those statistics in their meeting with Charlestown parents last week, careful not to alienate their new partners.

"You have to engage parents in a way that doesn't make them feel like you're blaming them, but show them that this practice is important for their kids' ability to read and for their school success," said Richard Weissbourd, a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education who founded ReadBoston and helped launch a similar effort in Cambridge in 2001 that many parents have embraced.

In Charlestown, the Boston literacy coaches joined parents and their children in making animal figures out of cherry-scented Play-Doh and modeled ways to use play to introduce words.

"Roar . . . roar," Hess said, as she showed 2-year-old Adrian how to make a dinosaur.

"Rojo, Adrian. Rojo," said Adrian's mother, Radaisy Santana, a 42-year-old from the Dominican Republic, as she made a dog out of the red lump of dough. Then she asked the boy in Spanish what noise a dog makes.

Next to them, Jose Santos bounced his 6-month-old daughter, Ky'Lee, on his lap. "Jumping, jump," he said. She giggled.

During the coming year, the literacy coaches plan to conduct home visits and hold workshops in housing developments and community health centers in Roslindale, Dorchester, Roxbury, and Jamaica Plain, said Theresa Lynn, executive director of ReadBoston.

In addition to the workshops, the coaches plan to accompany parents to the grocery store and on field trips to the zoo to practice infusing vocabulary lessons into everyday activities. Parents should read signs out loud, they said, or ask children to point out certain numbers, letters, or colors in a grocery aisle.

ReadBoston also plans to educate preschool teachers and day-care providers on the importance of talking to young children because often, Lynn said, the adults chatter among themselves and not to the children.

In Cambridge, about 75 percent of parents participating in a similar campaign have changed the way they talk and interact with their youngsters, said Lauren Leikin, who heads Cambridge's effort.

Catherine Snow, a professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education and an authority on children's literacy development, said the key to making the training stick is making the interactions fun for parents and for children.

"If it's taken on like a burdensome task, then it probably won't survive after the period of intervention," she said.

Tracy Jan can be reached at tjan@globe.com.

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