When pupils are identified as struggling with learning, it is rare for the obstacles they meet to be purely academic. Behind hesitation over writing, difficulties with comprehension or problems getting into learning, older fragilities often appear: missing words.
Words to tell a story. Words to explain. Words to understand an instruction. Words to make connections. Words to ask for help. Words, too, to talk about what one feels.
The experience of education professionals and research findings now converge on one essential point: language plays a fundamental role in a child’s development. Not only because it largely determines access to school learning, but also because it is an essential tool for thinking, communicating, regulating one’s emotions and understanding the world around us.
It is from this perspective that the work carried out by the association 1001mots appears particularly interesting.
Created in 2017, the association set itself the goal of reducing inequalities from the very first years of life by supporting parents from disadvantaged backgrounds in developing their child’s language. Its bet is both simple and ambitious: to act before school entry, at a time when the young child’s brain is particularly sensitive to human interaction and language experiences.
In practice, 1001 mots offers families support based on regular exchanges with a speech therapist, the sending of books suited to the child’s age and suggestions for simple activities to do every day. The idea is not to turn parents into teachers, but to support what they often already do spontaneously: talk with their child, tell them a story, sing a nursery rhyme, comment on what is happening around them or answer their questions.
This approach echoes what many scientific studies have shown over several decades: the quality of early language interactions plays a decisive role in a child’s development. It is not only the words heard that count, but the supportive interactions in which they take on meaning: genuine exchanges, shared attention, the adult’s scaffolding and the responses given to the child’s initiatives. Language development thus takes place within a relationship in which the adult gradually guides the child towards an ever more elaborate understanding of the world, of themselves and of others. Little by little, the words exchanged become an inner speech that helps to reflect, anticipate, memorise and control one’s actions. This process of internalisation is one of the foundations of the development of cognitive and emotional self-regulation.
By addressing vulnerable families, this approach also promotes equity. When some children start school with an already highly developed vocabulary while others have more limited language resources, the gaps risk widening over the course of schooling. Supporting early language interactions does not by itself resolve all social and educational inequalities, but it is one of the most promising levers for reducing them.
At a time when educational debates often focus on curricula, assessments or school performance, the initiative led by 1001 mots recalls a truth that is sometimes forgotten: learning takes root long before school. It is born in everyday exchanges, in stories told, in ordinary conversations, in those thousands of words that, day after day, allow a child to grow, to think, to understand others and gradually to find their place in the world.
The bet of 1001 mots is to consider that equality of opportunity begins well before the first exercise books and that a few thousand words exchanged in a child’s daily life can help to change their course lastingly. The association itself sums up this ambition in these terms: “As awakening to language from birth shapes a whole future, we want to offer this opportunity to every child, whatever the environment in which they grow up. ” https://1001mots.org/lassociation/
T.A.-C.
Photo credits: Mari Levi
