Research and policy
Research: Language is key to the class divide
2 Jan 2004
A vital piece of social research from America should be read by politicians of every party, who all profess to want to see disadvantaged children succeed. A key ingredient in determining future social class is language: the basic tool for thought, argument, reasoning and making sense of a confusing world. There is only a short time during the first three years that the brain absorbs language, the concepts it embodies and the culture implied.
Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children is one of the most thorough studies ever conducted. Three groups of children were tape-recorded throughout their first years: welfare families, working-class families and professional families. With painstaking care, researchers counted then extrapolated all the words a child would hear and speak in every encounter and interaction with its parent or care-giver. When they analysed the hours of recordings, the sharp class differences in the three groups' early experiences were startling.
By the age of four, 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. Consider this: they found the professional child at the age of three had a bigger vocabulary than the parent of the welfare child. The way children were spoken to was also measured, how much they were listened to, explained things, given choices and in what tone of voice. So at the age of three the professional child has had 700,000 encouragements addressed to it and only some 80,000 discouragements. But the welfare child will only ever have been encouraged 60,000 times in its life, suffering twice as many discouragements, with the working-class child in between the two.
This epic analysis confirms what we all secretly know already. The educated are better at communicating with their children than the uneducated, and the child is branded for life. When the children in the study were measured at age nine to 10, the authors, with an uncharacteristic slip from their stern academic terminology, conclude: "We were awestruck at how well our measures of accomplishments at age three predicted language skill at age nine to 10." In other words, school had added little value after the age of three; it was already too late.
Smug conservatives might think this confirms all their prejudices: class is in the DNA, or at least permanently deep-dyed into a child's immutable culture. But the point of this work is to prove it is not so. Intervention works. Give very young children intensive interaction with teachers and they make up for what they lack at home; parents can easily be taught to read and talk to their children constructively. IQ, they say, is only a measure of the child's early experience and that can be changed. But it takes a major effort; to get the welfare child up to the vocabulary standard of the working-class child, it would take 41 hours a week of talking at the level offered by the professional parent.
So if we really want to change class destiny, it can be done. But it takes good teachers in high-quality children's centres where children of all classes mix, not bundling all the deprived together. The Treasury sees a limited roll-out of children's centres in poor areas as a getting-mothers-off-benefit-and-back-to-work policy. But if they took the long (and expensive) view, this must be Labour's key remedy for social class division.
Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children, by Betty Hart and Todd R Risley, is published by Brookes Publishing in the US.
(From an article by Polly Toynbee in The Guardian, 2 January 2004)
