Teaching African American Children to Read: Language Variation is an Asset

• In Event: Cognition, Comprehension, Culture, and Cross-Linguistic Transfer: Advancing Equity in Reading Development

Abstract

Purposes Educational approaches to supporting children who speak varieties of English often view variation through a deficit lens centered on replacing any oral variation with the linguistic “standard.” These approaches ignore children’s cultural -linguistic assets, requiring them to switch codes, and utilize significant cognitive resources that may detract from efficient and effective reading acquisition. This presentation addresses: 1) the costs of ignoring dialect variation in assessments of reading and language acquisition with children who speak African American English (AAE); and, 2) the promise of translanguaging as an asset-based approach to reading fluency and syntax instruction with school-aged children who speak AAE.

Theoretical Framework and Background:
In their discussion of Cognitive Load Theory (CLT), Plass et al (2010) identify extraneous loads as those which detract from the learning task, requiring learners to apply cognitive effort to processes that do not directly support learning. Johnson’s (1969) Mismatch Hypothesis, combined with CLT, provide important potential explanations for the effortful learning that AAE-speaking children experience when learning to read. These frameworks relate directly to differences in linguistic codes codes, and to the approaches that we use in the instructional process, respectively.

Translanguaging offers both a promising theoretical framework and instructional approach for supporting the linguistic strengths of AAE-speaking children and identifying effective ways for integrating these strengths into language assessment and reading instruction (Washington & Iruka, 2025: Washington et al, 2024). Translanguaging encourages speakers to use their entire linguistic repertoires for developing language-based skills such as reading and writing (Garcia et al, 2017; Wei & Lin, 2019). Importantly, children are encouraged to apply existing linguistic strengths as they extend their current repertoires to include language-supported literacy skills.


Method: Including language variation in analysis of both assessments and reading instruction is important for determining linguistic competence. In the Study 1 syntactic performances of a large sample (N = 513) of AAE speaking school aged children on a standardized test of oral syntax was examined using multilevel modeling to explore the relationship of syntax growth and dialect density. Based on the outcomes, a pilot intervention (Study 2) with a small sample (N = 30) of different AAE-speaking children was conducted using a translanguaging approach that focused on making explicit connections between oral syntax and reading fluency and comprehension.

Results: In both studies, it was not until children’s dialect was accounted for in both the growth models (Study 1) and the intervention (Study 2) that children’s performance demonstrated their language competence. Specifically, on the standardized language instrument African American children's syntactic growth met normative expectations only when dialect density was entered into the model. Similarly, reading fluency and comprehension improved when students were allowed to use their linguistic strengths to support reading development.

Conclusions: Findings for both assessment and intervention supported the importance of considering children’s cultural language skills for accurate outcomes. Importantly, findings further confirm that AAE speakers performances in non-dialect sensitive do not adequately reflect linguistic competencies.

Authors

• Julie A. Washington, University of California - Irvine

• Katherine T Rhodes, University of California - Irvine