The Home Learning / Reading and Talk at Home

Ordinary conversation is doing more than it appears to

The talk that is not about school may be the most valuable talk in the house.

Households that talk a lot tend to raise children with more language available to them, and language is the material almost all school work is made of. This is one of the better supported general findings about home life, and the striking part is that the content does not seem to matter much. Talk about the news, the neighbour's renovation, why the car is making that noise, what you did at work, whether the umpire was right, what to cook on Thursday. The vocabulary and the sentence shapes travel regardless of the topic.

The useful ingredient is that the conversation goes back and forth. A child who is being informed is not getting the same thing as a child who is being asked, contradicted, and asked again. Turn taking is what does the work: it requires the child to hold an idea, put it into words, and adjust it when somebody responds. That is close to what every piece of written work at school will ask of them, practised in a setting with no marks attached. Interruptions, tangents and changes of mind are all part of it. A conversation that stays neatly on topic is usually one adult talking, and the child is getting far less out of it than the noise suggests.

The best sites for this are the boring ones. The car, the walk to the shops, the ten minutes of drying up after dinner, the queue at the counter. Side by side and unhurried beats face to face and formal almost every time, particularly with older children, who talk far more freely when they are not being looked at. None of this needs planning. It mostly needs the radio off and a question that is not about homework. Meals help too, where they are possible, though plenty of households eat in shifts and cannot manage a shared table most nights. The car and the walk are doing the same job, and they are usually easier to find.