Reading to Kids: Bridging the ‘Million Word Gap’
How — and why — to raise readers
The “million word gap”
Children whose parents read them five books a day enter kindergarten having heard about 1.4 million more words than kids who were barely ever read to, according to a new study, which will be published in an upcoming print issue of the Journal of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics,
Jessica Logan, lead author of the study and assistant professor of educational studies at The Ohio State University, calls it a “million word gap.”
From Jeff Grabmeier of the Ohio State News:
Logan said the idea for this research came from one of her earlier studies, which found that about one-fourth of children in a national sample were never read to and another fourth were seldom read to (once or twice weekly).
“The fact that we had so many parents who said they never or seldom read to their kids was pretty shocking to us. We wanted to figure out what that might mean for their kids,” Logan said.
Unlike older, controversial word gap studies that physically recorded the conversations of families of different socioeconomic statuses, Logan’s study counted the words in highly circulated children’s books, then multiplied those numbers by how…
