Language
Country/Area
No result found
hy do children from low socioeconomic status always lag behind in language ability
Socioeconomic status (SES) is an important indicator of an individual's or family's work experience and their access to economic resources and social status. As an important social judgment tool, SES is not only affected by family income, but also by education and occupational levels. In many cases, families with low socioeconomic status often face many challenges in the development of language skills, which makes these children likely to perform poorly in school performance and social skills.
The language environment of children from families with low socioeconomic status usually lacks opportunities for dialogue and book reading with their parents.
The formation of language ability
Research shows that a child’s language ability is closely related to his or her SES. Children from high-SES families tend to be exposed to more language input early on, which can shape their vocabulary and grammatical structure. For example, by the time they are one year old, children with higher SES are often exposed to several times the number of words per day on average than children with lower SES. This difference becomes more obvious when they are three years old, and the gap in language ability also widens with the development of school age.
Family environment and parent interaction
The language environment of low SES families often lacks interaction and communication. In these families, parents tend to use simpler and clearer language and often talk to their children in a commanding tone, while parents in high-SES families use more open-ended questions to encourage their children to express their thoughts. This difference in interaction may directly affect the child's language development and subsequent learning ability.
The study found that parents from low-SES families rarely used response-promoting questions, limiting their children's opportunities to practice more complex language patterns.
Differences in language ability
Phonetics, semantics, and syntax abilities are poorly performed in low-SES children, and this difference may lead to learning disabilities during the learning process. Children with low SES often have extra difficulty understanding word meanings and mastering sentence structures. This is partly due to their less language input, and partly due to the quality of interaction between parents and children. In addition, the lack of joint attention also makes low-SES children lag behind high-SES children in mastering language vocabulary.
Children from high-SES families show a larger expressive vocabulary at 24 months, which is directly related to the amount of language input they receive.
Improvement measures
To solve the problem of lagging language skills of low-SES children, we first need to improve their home language environment. Teachers and parents should strengthen language interaction with children to stimulate their language development. Within the education system, promoting a common understanding of SES and a relatively equal learning environment may be more helpful to the language development of these children. In addition, incorporating more interesting and interactive teaching methods so that students can be more actively involved in the learning process will help reduce the negative impact of SES.
Improving the collaboration between the family environment and school education and providing more resources to encourage children from low-SES families to explore and learn may be the key to overcoming this problem in the future. But how can we further break the shackles of intergenerational inheritance so that every child can develop language skills equally?
