Folio Books: Review of The Reading Crisis: Why Poor Children Fall Behind

The Reading Crisis: Why Poor Children Fall Behind

by Jeanne S Chall, Vicki A Jacobs, Luke E Baldwin

Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts

1990; paperback, 1991
Appendixes, bibliography, index

Dr Jeanne Chall, senior author of The Reading Crisis: Why Poor Children Fall Behind, is an educational psychologist and Professor of Education at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education. Her previous books include Learning to Read: The Great Debate, a monumental review and synthesis of the literature on methods of teaching reading.

The present volume is narrower in scope than The Great Debate. It is a report of a research project on the reading, writing and language of a small group (30) of low-income children. The original report was submitted to the National Institute of Education in 1982.* Parts of the study have since been published as book chapters, and this volume is itself one of two companion volumes based on the project, each dealing with a different aspect of it. The Reading Crisis focuses mainly on school and classroom influences on reading development, while home influences are covered in more detail in the companion volume by Catherine Snow and co-authors (Unfulfilled Expectations: Home and School Influences on Literacy, Harvard University Press, 1991; unseen).

The Reading Crisis is aimed at researchers and education professionals and is academic in content and style. It opens with a summary of the various theories (language theories, cognitive theories and school and classroom theories) proposed in the past to explain the lag in reading development of low-income children. This is followed by Dr Chall's model of reading development, which suggests that reading undergoes a qualitative change over time. Six stages are described, Stage 0 (6 months - 6 years) to Stage 5 (college-level), and are explained with the aid of two very helpful tables.

The main body of the book covers the study design, selection of schools, teachers, and subjects (30 low-income children in all), descriptions of the batteries of tests used, presentation and analysis of results, and conclusions.

The authors studied a small group of low-income children intensively using an array of measures and within-group comparisons to see if the various components of reading were all affected in the same way and at the same time. Below-average readers were compared with above-average readers at grades two, four and six, and all were followed over two years. Data were collected both on the children's progress and on home and classroom factors that might affect their progress.

The authors found that in the early years the children were in general on par with mainstream (middle-class) children. A slump was noted in the fourth grade, around age nine or ten. The authors identify meaning vocabulary as the biggest problem for low-income children, a problem that tends to worsen with increasing years in school as subject textbooks become more demanding and require a wider vocabulary of less common words. The findings suggest that teachable literacy skills, rather than cognitive factors, explain the reading problems of low-income children.

It was found that a strong literacy environment in the home (parents reading to children and buying books for them) was one of the "strongest specific predictors of both reading and vocabulary knowledge". This area is covered much too briefly here. It may be dealt with more fully in the companion volume.

In their conclusions and recommendations, the authors stress that early intervention is needed when a child shows signs of falling behind. They caution against exclusive use of a single focus and recommend a mix of methods, noting that "wide reading is essential to the development of automaticity and fluency". They further suggest that the vocabulary needed for subject textbooks can and should be taught in school.

This raises the question of the extent to which a child acquires vocabulary independently outside of school, particularly in the pre-school and early and middle school years, a question which is not really discussed here. The authors state in Chapter 1, and again in Chapter 10, that a six-year-old has a listening vocabulary of about 6000 words. A source for this figure would have been helpful. It must be a difficult thing to quantify and it would be interesting to know how it is done. The figure is likely to vary widely between individual children, depending in part on how much they have been read to by parents at the pre-school stage, and it is almost certainly a key factor in the transition to independent reading. It must be one of the most variable of variables in reading research, one of the most difficult to hold constant, and yet the one most likely to shed light on the reading problems of children in general, not only those from low-income homes.

*[Chall JS, Snow CE, Barnes WS, Chandler J, Goodman IF, Hemphill L, Jacobs V. Families and Literacy: The contribution of out-of-school experiences to children's acquisition of literacy. Final report to the National Institute of Education, December 22, 1982. ERIC Document Reproduction Service no. ED 234 345].

The Reading Crisis: Why Poor Children Fall Behind, by Jeanne Chall, Vicki Jacobs and Luke Baldwin; Harvard University Press, 1990; paperback, 191 pages, US$16.00 Order from Amazon

M.A., Sept 8, 1997