Purpose This study examined the relation between African American preschoolers' use of African American English (AAE) and their language and emergent literacy skills in an effort to better understand the perplexing and persistent difficulties many African American children experience learning to read proficiently. Method African American preschoolers' (n = 63) vocabulary skills were assessed in the fall and their language and emergent literacy skills were assessed in the spring. The relation between students' AAE use and their vocabulary and emergent literacy skills was examined using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM), controlling for fall vocabulary and other child, family, and school variables. Children’s use of AAE was examined across two contexts—sentence imitation and oral narrative using a wordless storybook prompt. Results There was a significant U-shaped relation between the frequency with which preschoolers used AAE features and their language and emergent literacy skills. Students who used AAE ...

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African American preschoolers' language, emergent literacy skills, and use of African American English: a complex relation.

Purpose In this study, the authors evaluated the contribution made by dialect shifting to reading achievement test scores of African American English (AAE)–speaking students when controlling for the effects of socioeconomic status (SES), general oral language abilities, and writing skills. Method Participants were 165 typically developing African American 1st through 5th graders. Half were male and half were female, one third were from low-SES homes, and two-thirds were from middle-SES homes. Dialect shifting away from AAE toward Standard American English (SAE) was determined by comparing AAE production rates during oral and written narratives. Structural equation modeling evaluated the relative contributions of AAE rates, SES, and general oral language and writing skills on standardized reading achievement scores. Results AAE production rates were inversely related to reading achievement scores and decreased significantly between the oral and written narratives. Lower rates in writing predicted a substan...

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African American English-speaking students: an examination of the relationship between dialect shifting and reading outcomes.

Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2: Discourse Analysis and its Discontents Chapter 3: Disadvantage: A Brief Overview Chapter 4: Disadvantage: The Genetic Case Chapter 5: Disadvantage: The Environmental Case Chapter 6: The Language Debate Chapter 7: The Persistence of Linguistic Deficit Chapter 8: Evaluative Reactions to the Language of Disadvantage Chapter 9: Black English as Ebonics Chapter 10: 'Foreign' Languages in the Classroom Chapter 11: Multiculturalism and Multicultural Education Chapter 12: Bilingualism: A Very Brief Overview Chapter 13: Bilingual Education Chapter 14: A Concluding Statement

Language Diversity in the Classroom

This paper renews the call for greater interest in applied work to deal with the obstacles faced in formal education by speakers of creoles (such as Hawai‘i Creole and Jamaican Creole) and minority dialects (such as African American English). It starts off with an update on developments in the use of these vernacular languages in educational contexts since 1998, focusing on educational programmes, publications and research by linguists and educators. It goes on to discuss some of the research and public awareness efforts needed to help the speakers of these vernacular varieties, with examples given from Hawai‘i.

Creoles and Minority Dialects in Education: An Update

Purpose To evaluate the role of dialect on phonemic awareness and nonword spelling tasks. These tasks were selected for their reliance on phonological and orthographic processing, which may be infl...

African American English Dialect and Performance on Nonword Spelling and Phonemic Awareness Tasks

Black English Syntax and Reading Interference.

Black Children and Reading: What Teachers Need To Know.

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Black Children's Reading of Dialect and Standard Texts. Final Report.

By the time they begin learning to read in school, children know a great deal about the forms and functions of language. This article describes some of the mismatches that can occur between child knowledge and the language of controlled "primerese" texts used to teach reading. Various reading miscues from a sample of 30 first grade children reading four controlled texts are analyzed to show how they resulted from controls on vocabulary and sentence length, and from overdependence on punctuation in primerese texts. The results elucidate the ways in which children bring their linguistic knowledge to bear on the reading process, and they indicate that the controls and distinctive features of primerese text are counterproductive. Three decades of intensive research on the development of linguistic and communicative competence have shown that children know a great deal about the forms and functions of language by the time they begin reading instruction in school. It has also been known for some time that children are inclined to bring this knowledge to bear on the reading process as demonstrated, for example, by the finding that their oral reading miscues tend to be syntactically or semantically consistent with the discourse contexts in which they occur (Goodman, 1967, 1973; Weber, 1970). The question we address in this study is what happens when linguistically knowledgeable children encounter the kind of unnatural "primerese" language typically used in basal texts for beginning readers. In an effort to make learning to read easier, the authors of primerese texts employ controls on vocabulary and sentence length that often result in violations of the "rules" that represent our tacit knowledge about the ways language is normally used in oral and written discourse. These violations produce primerese texts that are characterized by awkwardness and redundancy due to the frequent repetition of words in places where such repetition is odd or unnatural, by the absence of explicit connectives between sentences, by dependence on punctuation to mark syntactic relations, by the use of exophoric reference that makes interpretation of the text dependent upon illustrations, and by malformed stories in which basic elements are either carried by illustrations or omitted altogether (Beck, McKeown, & Caslin, 1981; Gourley, 1978; Shuy, 1981). Research in the Teaching of English, Vol. 23, No. 4, December 1989

Herbert D. Simons

Papers

Black English Syntax and Reading Interference.

Black Children and Reading: What Teachers Need To Know.

Black Children's Reading of Dialect and Standard Texts. Final Report.

Child Knowledge and Primerese Text: Mismatches and Miscues.

Black Children and Reading.