A Word about the Language-Rich Environment

Kids who experience a language-rich environment are generally better writers and readers. Period. They may not always be the best spellers. They may not always know the “rules” of grammar and punctuation. But they tend to express themselves with more clarity and originality than others. With enthusiasm and confidence, the rules follow.

What does it mean to come from a language-rich environment? What does such an environment look like?

First, this is a place where kids are both spoken to and listened to. It’s a place of conversation, where the television and the radio and the stereo are each turned off and time slows as people actually give each other their attention.

Adults in this place feel free to tell stories about their own childhoods. Oh, and importantly, they have fun reliving those times for their children. They get closer by making themselves known through stories.

Adults also listen to their children’s stories and fantasies. I’ll never forget listening to the private mythology my son Chris invented when he was five years old. Where his ideas came from I will never ever know, but there they were one quiet winter night in my cabin in the Pennsylvania mountains. He had named his mythological characters and spun a long story of how they all related to one another.

It was not important that I understood the story. I didn’t. And it was not important that I psychoanalyzed it. I simply honored it by listening. He had delighted in building a castle out of words, and that castle was as temporary as any castle built on the beach. It disappeared quickly in the waves of time.

If speaking and listening are essentials to the language-rich environment, reading to kids follows close behind. We read to Chris from the time he was born. Today he’s a high school social studies teacher and an avid reader and writer.

Check out one of my favorite books, The Read Aloud Handbook. Author Jim Trelease compiles research showing that reading with children helps develop vocabulary and a sense of grammar, improves attention span, improves school performance (and the likelihood that the child will stay in school), provides a reading role model (you), and—in addition to many other benefits—painlessly provides background information enlarging the child’s world.

A world of words and conversations and stories and books! A world of language for the home as well as the classroom! What could be a better and a more delightful preparation for our children?