What Counting Words Has Really Taught Us
The Word Gap, A Dangerous, but Useful Discourse
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21638967 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Stephanie Abraham (0000-0001-5096-4148, Rowan University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 53 |
| Issue | 1-2 |
| Pages | 137-150 |
| Publication date | 2020-04-02 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Equity & Excellence in Education (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1066-5684 • E-ISSN: 1547-3457 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/10665684.2020.1751008 |
| OpenAlex | W3036571576 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
| References cited | 27 |
For the past two decades, a claim of a word gap between the vocabulary sizes of poor children and their wealthier peers has inundated educational policy. In this article, I use critical discourse analysis to show how the word gap theory is a dangerous, but useful, discourse that continues to be produced as a scientific explanation for the cause of poverty and that closing the word gap will be the ultimate remedy for poor people. The word gap is a discourse that arose to explain away poverty, while supposedly countering deficit discourses about the innate unintelligence of poor people. It has relocated the problem with poor people from innate incompetence and laziness to social incompetence that was produced by a word deficit. The analysis showed that those who adhere to the word gap discourse are absolved from any critical questioning of the oppressive workings in American society
Laziness · Linguistics · Political science · Poverty · Social science · Sociology · Vocabulary · Educational Theory and Curriculum Studies · Global Educational Policies and Reforms · Law · Multilingual Education and Policy · Psychology
M(ai)cro
When a District Calls for Commitment
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Meeting the Needs of All Cultureless Learners
The Association Between Socioeconomic Status and Oral Vocabulary in Young Children
Annotated Bibliography of Research in the Teaching of English
The children of Sánchez
The Dialogic Imagination
Language socialization across cultures
The Everyday Language of White Racism
Theoretical Studies Towards a Sociology of Language
Methods of Critical Discourse Studies
How the Word Gap Argument Negatively Impacts Young Children of Latinx Immigrants' Conceptualizations of Learning
Pathologizing the Language and Culture of Poor Children
The Contribution of Early Communication Quality to Low-Income Children’s Language Success
Ways with Words
Borderlands/La Frontera
Exposing Gaps in/Between Discourses of Linguistic Deficits
Interrogating the Language Gap of Young Bilingual and Bidialectal Students
Debunking the “language gap”
The Social Construction of Intertextuality in Classroom Reading and Writing Lessons
Interpreting the early language trajectories of children from low-SES and language minority homes
Reexamining the Verbal Environments of Children From Different Socioeconomic Backgrounds
Orders of discourse
Reflexivity and Critique in Discourse Analysis
Invited Forum
| Citations per year | 1.2 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2021 - 2026 (6) |
| Highly cited | No |