The Importance of Integrating Language Variation Into Literacy and Language Assessment of African American Children

• In Event: Critical Conversation: What Are the Roles of Sociocultural and Socioemotional Variables in the Science of Reading?

Abstract

Purpose
When children enter school they bring with them a rich and developing history of language and literacy practices that they have learned in their families and communities. Upon entry into school they must integrate new ways of using oral language into their existing repertoires, and then utilize this information to support language-based academic skills, including reading and writing (Washington et al, 2018; Garcia & Wei, 2014). When children’s’ early language and literacy practices match those of the school and classroom, access to text can be easier than when cultural practices diverge from those supported in school (Brown et al, 2015; Washington & Seidenberg, 2021). For African American children the use of African American English (AAE) interacts with literacy and language development in important and predictable ways. Recent studies demonstrate the importance of integrating African American children’s language into teaching and assessment practices (Newkirk-Turner & Green, 2021; Washington et al, 2023) Unfortunately, AAE continues to be undervalued and suppressed in schools rather than utilized to support development of language and literacy skills. We will examine: 1) the importance of allowing children to utilize their full linguistic repertoires for improving performance, and 2) patterns of cultural language use that are overlooked on standardized assessments that demonstrate the true linguistic gifts of AAE speakers.

Theoretical Framework
Translanguaging is a culturally-sustaining theoretical framework which encourages children to use their full linguistic repertoires during assessment and learning. Translanguaging posits that children who speak more than one language variety are not learning to switch between codes, but instead must take stock of the communicative context and select from their internal feature set the forms that are appropriate for learning and communication (Garcia, 2019). In a translanguaging context children are encouraged to utilize all language forms that support meaning-making, communicative competence and efficiency.

Methods, Data Sources and Analysis
Participants were 477 African American children enrolled in third through fifth grades. The Test of Written Language-4 (Hammill & Larsen, 2004), Woodcock Johnson-III Achievement Tests (Woodcock et al, 2001) and selected subtests of the Test of Language Development-IV (Newcomer & Hammill, 2008) were used to assess reading and language. Data were coded for AAE responding and an item analysis was utilized to examine individual child responses. Dialect-sensitive scoring was applied to the data.

Findings
Student responses to General American English (GAE) items greatly underestimated the linguistic knowledge of AAE speakers. This resulted in lower overall scores, frequently placing African American childrens’ performance in the bottom of the standardized distribution. A dialect-sensitive scoring approach and analysis that incorporated dialect responding resulted in increases in scores, and provided important insight into the linguistic competence of AAE-speaking children that was masked by their poor linguistic performance using GAE scoring.

Significance
Accounting for children’s full linguistic repertoires during learning and assessments is critical for unbiased assessment and culturally-sustaining teaching. We provide evidence that for African American children who use AAE, integration of their language into administration, scoring and interpretation of assessment outcomes provides important insights into their linguistic competence and avoids deficit-interpretations.

Authors

• Julie A. Washington, University of California - Irvine

• Katherine T Rhodes, University of California - Irvine