How the Word Gap Argument Justifies Educational Inequalities for Young Children of Immigrants

• In Event: 56.052 - International Perspectives on Bilingualism in Early Childhood Education and Care Programs

Abstract

Early childhood education that encompasses preK-3rd grade (ages 3-8) continues to be an indicator of future school success. Discrimination, however, can still be an obstacle for many children of Latina/o immigrants because they often receive less sophisticated and dynamic learning experiences than their white, native-born peers (Crosnoe, 2005; Suárez-Orozco, Pimentel, & Martin, 2009). This paper explains how the word gap (or language gap) argument has perpetuated a rationale for this kind of continued discrimination in early childhood education.

Drawing upon researcher experiences as well as empirical data from focus group interviews with over 200 superintendents, administrators, teachers, parents and young children in ten school sites, this paper first recounts the unexpected arrival of the word gap discourse in the data. The word gap argument is that “by the age of 3, children born into low-income families heard roughly 30 million fewer words than their more affluent peers” (NPR Staff, 2013). This word gap discourse entered social media in 2013 and was featured in stories in dozens of news outlets. The stories as well as the argument itself emphasized what families lacked and how they failed their children, rather than on the knowledge children brought with them from home to school. At the end of data analysis, we had identified traces of the word gap argument across all the sites in our study.

The paper begins with interview, focus group and observational data from seven school sites to demonstrate the range of responses teachers and administrators had to the practices in a film. The film showed a day in a first grade classroom where Latino children of immigrants could use a lot of agency in their learning.. Educators had varying responses to the practices. Some thought they were impressive and wished they could implement more agentic practices in their own classrooms. Some thought that the practices were too advanced for young children. Yet most of the educators told us that practices in the film such as project learning and student-led discussions would not work for the Latina/o children of immigrants at their schools because of their lack of vocabulary.

The focus of this paper is how the limiting of learning experiences justified in part by the word gap argument impacted the 56 first grader participants in our study. Instead of having a variety of responses to the practices in the film like the adults, all children in the multi-sited part of the study had the same reaction. When we asked them what they thought about the classroom in the film, they told us it was terrible. They thought the children in the film were bad. They explained that learning was meant to be silent, still and obedient. Using empirical data from our study, this paper tries to make sense of why the word argument was so powerful and patterned with the many caring administrators and teachers we interviewed and how teachers’ ideas about the word gap impacted young children’s understanding of learning and being a learner.

Author

• Jennifer Keys Adair, The University of Texas - Austin