The importance of words

When they want to develop a reading habit in their children, parents have a ready tool at their disposal – a “book flood,” a term coined by Warwick Elley in 1991. In other words, children need access to a lot of books. Print of all sorts. A wide range of interesting reading materials.

What this “book flood” does for young children is rather clear: It gives them a wealth of words to enhance their reading and thinking. Maryanne Wolf noted in 2007 that by age five the average young middle-class child hears 32 million more spoken words than an underprivileged five-year-old.

Put it this way: There are over 2 ½ million words in a Harry Potter book. This means that by age five, an average kindergartener has heard the equivalent of nearly 13 more Harry Potter books than has his underprivileged classmate.

This wealth of vocabulary means more than words unheard and unlearned, according to Wolf. She states, “When words are not heard, concepts are not learned. When syntactic forms (sentence patterns) are never encountered, there is less knowledge about the relationship of events in a story. When the story forms are never known, there is less ability to infer and predict. When cultural traditions and feelings of others are never experienced, there is less understanding of what other people feel.”

According to Kelly Gallagher (2009), by third grade children who suffer from “word poverty” have a huge word deficit of at least one million words. By sixth grade, they are at least three grade levels behind their age-performing peers. Learning to read at school is not enough to help some children overcome the word gap when they enter school.

What childhood reading research shows us is that pre-school children need a lot of books read to them by age five. In our small community, parents of young children have two valuable resources – the town library and the elementary school library. When parents are looking to help their children become readers, there is no better place for them to turn to than the libraries we have here. It is a win-win situation for all.