A Gadget to Help Latinos Shrink the ‘Word Gap’

By Victor Landa, NewsTaco

My wife is an educator, so I’ve heard of the “word gap” in conversations with her. The word gap is the difference in the number of words that a child hears before they are old enough to go to school. It’s important because the more different words a child hears the larger their vocabulary becomes, and the larger their vocabulary the more prepared they are to succeed in school.

Latino kids hear significantly less words than white kids, so when they enter kindergarten they’re already behind. Here are some numbers to think about, as reported in NBCNews:

While children of high-income families hear up to 20,000 words a day, children from low socio-economic status families hear significantly less, some hearing as few as 600 child-directed words. A child in a low-income household has heard 30 million fewer words by his or her fourth’s birthday than a child from a higher-earning home.

You can count most Latino households in the low-income group.

There’re a whole bunch of programs and non-profits that are trying their best to reduce that gap with parenting classes and headstart initiatives, but now there’s a gadget, a piece of technology that can help close the gap. The Latino Mayor of Providence Rhode Island is putting that gadget in the hands of low-income parents to help them help their kids.

It’s a pilot program called Providence Talks that Mayor Angel Taveras initiated this month:

The pilot program involves 75 families from Early Head Start programs. The families, with children up to 3 years old, receive a conversation recorder — a “word pedometer” — that calculates how many words the child hears on a daily basis. The project is a collaboration between Brown University researchers, the LENA Research Foundation and community groups.

After the word-o-meter counts, the parents are coached on how to speak more words to their children. The hope is that by the age of 4 the kids will be as proficient as their affluent counterparts.

It’s a program all cities should be keeping an eye on.