UKLA believes that;
The ways in which children experience language and literacy varies widely across diverse communities and family homes. Children arrive at school having been exposed to a range of different language and literacy repertoires. The current Baseline Assessment is confined to a narrow aspect of language development and a limited subset of literacy skills; therefore, it fails to elicit children’s true communicative capabilities. ( see Reception Baseline Assessment – More Than a Score ).
- Baugh, J. (2017). Meaning-less differences: exposing fallacies and flaws in “the word gap” hypothesis that conceal a dangerous “language trap” for low-income American families and their children. International Multilingual Research Journal 11(1):39-51.
- Burnett, C., Merchant, G. and Neumann, M. (2020). Closing the gap? Overcoming limitations in sociomaterial accounts of early literacy. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy 20(1): 111–133.
- Cushing, I. (2021). ‘Say it like the Queen’: the standard language ideology and language policy making in English primary schools. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 34(3), 321-336.
- Cushing, Ian (2022) Word rich or word poor? Deficit discourses, raciolinguistic ideologies and the resurgence of the ‘word gap’ in England’s education policy, Critical Inquiry in Language Studies DOI: 10.1080/15427587.2022.2102014
- Kuchirko, Y . (2019). On differences and deficits: A critique of the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of the word gap. Journal of Early Childhood 19 (4): 533-562.
