Week 8

Readings Week 8
Emma Fitzpatrick 2107606

‘Bridging the Vocabulary Gap: What the Research Tells Us About Vocabulary Instruction in Early Childhood’

‘Wynn, K. (2000). Findings of addition and subtraction in infants are robust and consistent: Reply to Wakeley, Rivera, and Langer. Child Development, 71(6), 1535-1336’

For this week’s readings, I chose “Bridging the Vocabulary Gap: What Research tells us About Vocabulary instruction in Early Childhood” and “Findings of addition and subtraction in infants are robust and consistent: reply to Wakeley, Rivera and Langer”. I chose this literacy reading, as I haven’t yet heard about the “Vocabulary Gap” and want to know what it is and what I can do to close the gap in my future classroom. The reason I chose this numeracy reading was because I haven’t done much, if any focus on numeracy in infants.

I remember reading in a previous reading, those children that come from low income families, and were three years of age, knew approximately 600 words less of those children of the same age, in a higher income family. Although I didn’t know that by the time those children are in grade two, the gap of vocabulary development increases to approximately 4,000 words.

There are four ways in which teachers can help support Early Childhood years with vocabulary development. These four researched based teaching practices are as follows:
1) – Provide purposeful exposure to new words,
2) – intentionally teach word meanings,
3) – teach word-learning strategies and
4) – offer Opportunities to use newly learned words.

I found this reading very interesting and I learnt a lot. I was able to distinguish ways to better my teaching ways to make vocabulary development inclusive for every individual child.

In the numeracy reading, Karen Wynn provides and discusses findings from a range of studies that approve or disapprove infants understanding of simple addition and subtraction. In the studies, proved to be successful, infants were given simple addition and subtraction equations. The various equations were correct and some were incorrect. The infants would look at the incorrect equations longer than the correct equations. The studies that were disapproving the relation to infants understanding simple addition and subtraction, were trying to challenge the idea.

Although this reading proved the different sides and arguments to the relation of infants understanding simple subtraction and addition, I would like to trial this myself. I am a big believer in ‘not believing until I see’. This subject is challenging for me to understand, and if the opportunity arises, I would love to look further into this area.

(L) Christ, T. & Wang, C. (2010). Bridging the vocabulary gap: What the research tells us about vocabulary instruction in early childhood. Young Children, July, 84-91. http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.flinders.edu.au/docview/873822737?accountid=10910

(N) ‘Wynn, K. (2000). Findings of addition and subtraction in infants are robust and consistent: Reply to Wakeley, Rivera, and Langer. Child Development, 71(6), 1535-1336’