ABSTRACT 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.

中文翻译：

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数词真正教会了我们什么：词的差距，一个危险但有用的话语

摘要 在过去的 20 年里，关于贫困儿童与其富裕同龄人的词汇量之间存在单词差距的说法已经淹没了教育政策。在这篇文章中，我使用批判性话语分析来展示词差距理论是如何是一种危险但有用的话语，它继续作为对贫困原因的科学解释而产生，并且缩小词差距将是解决贫困问题的最终方法。穷人。差距这个词是为了解释贫困而出现的一种话语，同时据称是为了反驳关于穷人与生俱来的无知的赤字话语。它将穷人的问题从先天的无能和懒惰转移到了由字词缺陷造成的社会无能。