As you may have gathered from my last post on building a “language
house”, I’m rather fond of metaphors as tools for exploring and teasing out concepts.
Referring to the peeling of the humble onion is hardly a sophisticated literary
device, but go with me on this one, so we can have a closer look at how
language competence might be a protective factor in early life (and indeed,
across the lifespan).
But first, some context. I am sometimes asked about the
journey that led me to be interested in studying the language skills of young
people who experience vulnerability and adversity in early life. The answer
lies in part, in my restlessness after the completion of my PhD (in the field
of traumatic brain injury) in 1998, and my urge to broaden my intellectual and professional
horizons. Some of my peers and mentors at the time described this urge as “courageous”
(code for “foolhardy”), while others, I suspect, were just plain perplexed.
However, to my delight (and, I’ll admit, trepidation), I was appointed in 1999
as a Research Fellow in a conjoint appointment between the Australian Drug
Foundation and the School of Psychology at Deakin University. Looking back, I
think the saying “Leap and the net shall appear” might be apt as a description
for the next three years – a fasten-your-seatbelt-and-hold-on-tight journey
into what often felt like a foreign country. I’ll come back to this in a later
post, but have hopefully provided some context for my onion analogy.
Some time in 2000, I found myself immersed in the literature
on risk and protective factors pertaining to substance use, mental health, and overall
adjustment in adolescence. Much of this work stems from the Communities that Care research carried out by Hawkins and Catalano in the USA
and can be roughly summed up this way: risk factors promote the likelihood of
all kinds of personal, social, and health
adversities, while protective factors buffer against adverse outcomes.
Risk and protective factors exist at the level of the community (e.g. level of socio-economic
advantage), the school (e.g. presence of whole school policies and practices
that promote a sense of safety and well-being as precursors to learning), the
family (e.g. cohesion, warmth, parenting style), and the individual (e.g. social
skills, coping styles). Risk and protective factors are cumulative on both
sides of the ledger – so, as you might expect, a young person in a poor
community, attending an under-performing school, coming from a chaotic family,
and possessing limited social and coping skills, is going to face greater risk
of adverse outcomes than a peer who can count some protective factors instead
of these risks.
However, what struck me about these lists was something else
altogether: the fact that “academic success” was invariably either at the top,
or very close to it, of the list of protective factors, and its inverse,
academic failure, was frequently ranked high on the list of risk factors. This
in itself is perhaps not terribly surprising, but what was surprising to me
that no-one seemed to have “peeled the
onion” on this self-evident truism. Think of each question below as a layer of
the onion (and try not to cry)
Q1. Who are the
children who succeed academically?
A1. Overwhelmingly, those who succeed academically have successfully
(and often quite seamlessly) made the transition to literacy in the first three
years of school. Most education systems are highly reliant on the ability to
process (and produce) written text as a means of knowledge transfer, critical analysis,
reflection, and synthesis of ideas. That’s just how things are.
Q2. So – Which children
successfully make the transition to literacy?
A2. In order to “cross the bridge” from oral language (talking
and listening of many varieties) in the
pre-school years, to reading and writing in the first three years of school, children
require certain skills in their language toolkit. Learning how to read has been
recognised in recent years as being a linguistic
task i.e. one that draws heavily on the child’s expressive and receptive vocabulary,
narrative skills, grasp of syntactic rules for embedding ever more complex
meaning, and of course, phonological and phonemic awareness skills. The latter
two (knowledge of sounds and of sound units in words) are particularly relevant
to the transition to literacy because of their foundational role in
establishing phoneme-grapheme links as a basis for decoding skills.
Q3. Given the above,
why isn’t oral language competence talked about more in public health circles
as a protective factor that's important for all children?
Well this really is the “bottom line” for me and has been at
the heart of much of my research and proselytising in recent years. Perhaps my migration from another
paradigm made this easier for me to see, in much the same way that when we
visit foreign countries, we make observations about everyday phenomena to which
the locals have become habituated.
So, if policy makers in education, health, and
welfare want to address some of the inequalities associated with early
socio-economic disadvantage (they are many and long-lasting) then perhaps part
of the answer might be (almost literally), right under their noses – a focus on
children’s early verbal skills as a means of increasing the benefit that all
children can receive from that most widespread of public health interventions - an
education.
© Pamela Snow 2013
Picture source: http://stkelsiej.wordpress.com/category/stkelsiejcom/devotions/
Tweet
© Pamela Snow 2013
Picture source: http://stkelsiej.wordpress.com/category/stkelsiejcom/devotions/
