In 1983 U.S. Secretary
of Education Terrel Bell shocked the nation with the release
of his report, A Nation at Ris. We Americans had long prided
ourselves on having the world's best schools producing the
brightest children. Occasional reports of children in other
countries outperforming Americans caused some slight anxiety.
However, Bell's report was really the wake-up call. He concluded
that the decline in academic performance had become so serious
that "it threatens our very future as a nation and
as a people."
Reading is at the heart of academic achievement. Research
clearly shows that reading is one of the strongest predictors
of school success. The president's stress on reading in
his "Leave No Child Behind"initiative is right
on the mark.
Raising our children to be readers, then, is a very important
responsibility. This topic is so important that I am going
to dedicate a series of these columns to what we parents
can do to raise readers.
The first, and perhaps the most important, step we can
take is talking with our children from the moment they are
born. Children start the process of distinguishing different
sounds in first days of their lives. The more parents and
others talk to children, the more practice they get and
the faster they are able to pick out sounds they then begin
to imitate themselves. We call this early imitation "babbling,"
which makes it sound random, but it isn't. Recent research
definitively shows that very young infants are quickly engaged
in the process of trying to reproduce the sounds they hear.
The words that emerge many months later have been under
construction for a long time.
Research shows that one of the strongest predictors of
later reading ability is the amount of one-to-one conversation
between caregiver and baby in the first three years of life.
The ability to differentiate sounds is the first crucial
step on the path that later will lead to the ability to
associate sounds with letters.
Reading's first lessons don't happen in school. They happen
in the crib. When we talk to babies and read them stories
before they can even hold a book, we are taking the first
important steps in raising readers.
