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17 Sep 2006

There's something very odd about the fact that we put so much emphasis on children's literacy and practically none on listening skills. Around 45 per cent of communication is spent listening and only nine per cent writing. Listening, like talking, is assumed to be a skill that children pick up naturally, but it's no longer something that parents and teachers can take for granted.

"The problem is that children are not being communicated with inside the home," says speech therapist Helen White, co-author with Christina Evans of a new book called Learning to Listen to Learn. "There's so much noise in the home environment - TV, washing machines, phones, computer games, etc - that when the mother or father calls children, on the rare occasions that happens, they're not reacting."

White, a New Zealander now working in London, says the number of children with delayed language development has soared in recent years because they're not getting the opportunities to develop listening and language skills before they start school. Background noise, time-pressed working parents, stress and lack of awareness are some of the reasons. Other factors, such as the direction of pushchairs (facing away from the parent) and the use of pacifiers, may also impede parent-child dialogue and impair language development.

A major factor, though, is socio-economic status. White cites the work of American researchers Betty Hart and Todd R Risley, who followed the progress of groups of children from welfare, working-class and professional families. "By the age of four," she says, "a professional's child will have had 50 million words addressed to it, a working-class child 30 million and a welfare child just 12 million. They found that the professional child at the age of three had a bigger vocabulary than the parent of a welfare child."

The researchers also measured how the children were spoken to. At the age of three, the one from the professional family had had 700,000 encouragements addressed to it, compared to only 60,000 for the welfare child. That sort of disparity creates a massive long-lasting disadvantage. "We were awestruck," commented the researchers, "at how well our measures of accomplishments at three predicted language skill at nine to 10."

Another factor putting young children at a disadvantage is the way that adults talk to them. Some adults refuse to use babytalk or “motherese”. White quotes Sally Ward, a prominent British speech therapist: "A lot of middle-class adults, especially teachers, won't do it, and talk to their infants as if they were 20. It causes all sorts of problems."

“Motherese”, which occurs primarily in Western countries, is still controversial - but proponents believe that it helps children to acquire language more quickly because the high pitch gives it special acoustic properties that appeal to infants. It may also help that pronunciation tends to be clear, with careful distinctions between similar-sounding phonemes and relatively few abstract words. The one-to-one dialogue gives children the chance to practise speech, something not achieved by plonking them in front of a television set. In Britain, a Talk To Your Baby campaign was launched in 2003. Liz Attenborough, the co-ordinator of the campaign, run by the National Literacy Trust, told the Daily Telegraph: "Unbelievable as it seems, some children starting nursery do not seem to have ever had a one-to-one conversation with anyone."

Young children are also not being played with, says White. She is seeing more and more of them with dyspraxia or clumsy child syndrome, which can affect their language development. "We have to take these children back to movements that they should have done as infants. Allowing children to crawl develops their brain. If they skip that and are put into walkers to scoot around, they miss that stage."

It was while teaching school children with specific language impairment how to listen attentively that White and Evans realised that the same techniques could benefit children in mainstream classes. The speech and language centre headed by White is attached to a secondary school, Lampton School in Hounslow, west London, which gave them the opportunity to train all new Year 7 students. The results, says White, have been impressive, leading to improvements in social skills, learning and classroom behaviour.

A key element of the programme is teaching the children to use a range of senses to enhance their listening. They quickly learn that listening attentively is more complex than they thought. Sitting correctly, not slouching, makes active listening much easier, says White. By sitting in a relaxed upright position, you make effective use of your vestibular system, which helps us to maintain balance and move through space. The vestibular system, located in the inner ear, influences auditory, visual and muscle functions.

"If you put children in this sitting position [back upright, feet on floor, hands on desk], which is very relaxed, they absolutely hate it. But then we give them a series of exercises to do, like folding arms, and the brain will develop new patterns and they get used to it."

Facing the speaker is also important, yet in many primary school classrooms the students are arranged in groups that make it difficult to focus on what the teacher is saying. The research shows that children seated in pairs facing forward spend up to 120 per cent longer on task.

If parents want their children to listen to them at home, says White, then they need to cut out distracting background noise and make sure that the child is facing them. But parents also need to model listening. What was coming through from the children was that their parents weren't listening to them, particularly dads. We do need to stop what we're doing and watch and listen to the child and show we're listening. The biggest thing a parent can do is listen, not just pretend they're listening."

(Noel O'Hare, Listener - the things that matter)

Tags: Talk To Your Baby