What shocked me the most about the readings this week was the Hart & Risley article, The Early Catastrophe: The 30 Million Word Gap by Age 3. It was not surprising that children pick up the same vocabulary skills as their parents. I was just shocked that there was such a language development gap between children from different types of homes: "in four years, an average child in a professional family would accumulate experience with almost 45 million words, an average child in a working-class family 26 million words, and an average child in a welfare family 13 million words" (Hart & Risley, 2003, p. 9). As a teacher, I believe that it is important to look into what kind of family a student is from if they struggle with reading. This will help me to identify whether or not the student has enough support at home to further develop his or her current vocabulary. If there is not enough support at home, perhaps I could arrange cooperative learning activities for the class to work on building vocabulary. This also draws upon Daniels & Zemelman's description of building a community of learners. I plan to create a welcoming classroom environment where students are respected and respect one another. With this environment in place, this may be the perfect opportunity for students to work together to build one another's vocabulary skills. As a mathematics teacher, I would focus on vocabulary in mathematics. However, I could also use this as an opportunity for students to build upon their everyday English vocabulary. For example, I could have students research the roots of mathematics vocabulary words or find words in English with similar meanings to those vocabulary words.
I like your idea of pushing students further by using research on math terms to expand their vocabulary. It seems more and more that it's becoming the teacher's job to expose students to rich vocabulary, and it is - to a point. Good post. I've seen those statistics before, and every time I see them i'm shocked myself.
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