Story Time and Early Language Development Are Critical Components to School Success: Reflections from Ruby Payne

Many children's advocates and service providers are familiar with the work of Ruby Payne, who focuses on understanding and working with students and adults from poverty. Dr. Payne's work often considers the connections between language, cognitive issues, and the resources available to children and their families. Families from poverty, she tells us, often lack vital resources, including monty, emotional self-control, mental abilites and skills, physical health and well-being, a support system (including family, friends, perhaps a savings account), role models, and knowledge of the hidden rules - the unspoken habits and cues of a group.

To understand why achievement and discipline are such issues for students who come from families that have experienced multi-generational poverty, it is important to understand that there are different language "registers." While formal register, for example, uses complete sentences and a large vocabulary, casual register is characterized by a much smaller vocabulary (400 to 500 worlds), broken sentences and many non-verbal cues.

A California researcher, Maria Montano-Harmon, has found that while assessment tests demand that students understand formal register, many low-income students do not speak formal register and only know casual register.

Cognitive Issues

Research tells us that early memory is strongly linked to the predominant story structure that an individual knows. If a child has not had much experience with stories that feature cause and effect, consequence and sequence, then the student will not learn to plan. According to Feuerstein (1980):

• If an individual cannot plan, they cannot predict.
• If an individual cannot predict, they cannot identify cause and effect.
• If an individual cannot identify cause and effect, they cannot identify consequence.
• If an individual cannot identify consequence, they cannot control impulsivity.
• If an individual cannot control impulsivity, they are more inclined to anti-social behavior.

Why is this a particular issue for children in poverty? Poverty, Ms. Payne tells us, forces a family to spend more time on survival. This is particularly true for single parent families. With only one parent present, there is less time and energy to interact directly with children and also put food on the table. This problem is compounded further for particularly young parents who lack additional parenting resources.

A Behavioral Response

The good news is that many of the cognitive issues that arise from early language deficiencies are amenable to intervention. Specifically, interventions can be powerful tools when they help children learn three things: what stimuli to pay attention to, why these stimuli matter, and how best to deal with the challenges that the stimuli present.

This process, Ms. Payne tells us, helps to build cognitive strategies for the mind. When these strategies are only partially in place, the mind can only partially accept and process what it is being asked to learn. But by helping to build the cognitive toolkit that children need to process complex information, their families, care providers and early educators are establishing the foundation for their later success and development.

This article is drawn from Ruby Payne, 1996.  "Understanding and Working with Students and Adults from Poverty" Instructional Leader a publication of the Texas Elementary Principals and Supervisors Association.