Conversation matters

It might seem common sense that having conversations with children will help them to develop their communication and language. But up until recently, many of us have been influenced by two approaches which, though well-intended, haven’t always been helpful in promoting conversation.

First of all, there was that big focus on the ’30-million word gap’. Hart and Risley’s ground-breaking research from the 1990s showed that American children from disadvantaged backgrounds heard 30 million fewer words by the age of three than their more affluent peers. As a result, one of the suggestions to help children to overcome this early disadvantage was to talk more. I remember how this could encourage practitioners make long commentaries about what children were doing. This ensured that they heard more words whilst they were in nursery or with their childminder: a simple way to close the word gap.

But this research has been challenged in a number of ways. Firstly, other researchers could not replicate the results. On face value, it seems unlikely that children would here so many fewer words in just 3 years.

Secondly, there was a concern that this research was making out that poorer parents, who were mostly people of colour, were somehow deficient in their approach and needed to copy white, middle-class cultural practices. The approaches that researchers use to measure families’ ways of communicating overlooked valuable and culturally specific practices that suited their children well.?

More recent research by Rachel Romeo and her colleagues suggests that what’s important is the number of back-and-forth conversations children are involved with, not the number of words they hear.?

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