Socializing Children for Academic Success: The Power and the Limits of Language
Friday, 2:30 PM - 4:15 PM
Sheraton Constitution A&B

Speaker: Catherine E. Snow, Harvard Graduate School of Education
Chair: Peggy Miller, University of Illinois

Biographical Sketch
Catherine Snow is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She received her Ph.D. in psychology from McGill and worked for several years in the linguistics department of the University of Amsterdam. Her research has focused on children’s language development, literacy development, social and familial influences on literacy development, acquisition of language and literacy by language minority children, adolescent literacy, and the prerequisites for improving literacy instruction in middle and secondary schools. She has published several books and many articles in refereed journals and chapters in edited volumes. Snow chaired the National Research Council Committee on Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children, the RAND Reading Study Group that produced the volume Reading for Understanding: Towards an R&D agenda, and the National Academy of Education committee that produced the 2005 volume Knowledge to Support the Teaching of Reading. For more information: http://gseweb.harvard.edu/~snow/

Abstract
Vocabulary knowledge is a powerful predictor of children’s academic outcomes. Vocabulary relates to reading skills in the early grades, and the relationship grows stronger in later grades. Vocabulary knowledge is related to measures of linguistic awareness, to indicators of world knowledge, and to oral proficiency in conversation and in producing extended discourse. Fortunately, the interactive experiences that contribute to rapid vocabulary growth for preschool-aged children are becoming clear, and the features of classroom discourse and reading experiences that ensure continued growth of vocabulary knowledge among elementary school-aged children are also becoming known. However, two major challenges remain: a) figuring out how to massively accelerate vocabulary learning for students who arrive at school far behind, whether because they are second language learners or because they come from low-language homes, and b) figuring out whether it is vocabulary knowledge itself, or its association with knowledge about academic language features and with rich world knowledge stores that explains its powerful predictive role.