Early childhood education experts and researchers agree: vocabulary development is considered foundational to young children’s language and literacy learning, journalist Emily Campbell writes.
Typically, children enter formal schooling with an estimated vocabulary of between 2,300 and 4,700 root words (Biemiller, 2009 in Anderson & Anderson, 2021).
However, there tends to be a significant gap in the vocabularies of young children from immigrant families and families living in ‘vulnerable’ communities, or English Language Learners who speak another language at home, and those for whom English is the first language (Graves et al., 2013; Mancilla-Martinez & Leseaux, 2011)
