And "phonemic awareness" is an emergent property. It's required, t'would appear, for reading readiness. But it apparently results from hearing a sufficient number of tokens for a sufficiently large number of individual words.
Most "phonemic awareness" programs just provide more input--more tokens, more words.
Some will claim stress. People under stress don't talk. And their baby-sitters don't talk. And their friends don't talk. Stressed folk in poverty are uncommunicative and taciturn. (In what universe?)
Or perhaps they're working, and leave the kids in isolation booths. Alone, with no adult supervision.
Uh ... No.
Instead it's all interactional styles, child-rearing practices. Cultural. Those victimized as kids become victimizers as adults.
The most telling is that those on welfare, those who, two decades ago, were home much more often than working-class folk, produced the fewest tokens for their kids. They were home: They just marginalized their own offspring, depriving them of necessary sensory stimulation. (Which is actually a larger issue, more general, and just as true.)
You provide EC programs to remedy the problem in "EC" and when they're in "middle childhood" the problems resurface for all the same reasons. The biggest impediment to many at-risk kids' education isn't the schools--the brick-and-mortar buildings, the teachers, are adequate for other kids. But filling in the gaps that undereducated parents of at-risk kids bequeath to their kids is difficult. It's an on-going struggle.
My "kids" in my class fail their tests for two reasons. They can't hack the math.It's too abstract, they can't generalize, picking up their algebra "tools" and bringing them to my class. Mostly, though, they don't understand the questions. Tet if you try to teach them to understand what's being said, they get upset. It's condescending. But they just don't get it. "Compare" versus "contrast." "With respect to." I have kids who can't sort out that "5 minus 3" and "3 subtracted from 5" are the same thing. "Five divided by two" and "two divided into five" aren't the same. Do you simplify things to let them pass, or insist that they understand how the rest of the educated populace speaks?
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