Language Development as it Relates to Intervention Needs

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Mar 1, 2014 - **What is a community of speakers? • Texters. • OMG. • ROFL. • TTYL. • Ethnic groups. • Africa
Language, Literacy, and Educating Urban Students Julie A. Washington, Ph.D. Georgia State University March 1, 2014

What is language? • A symbol system • A dynamic system that grows and changes; • New words are added regularly, while others disappear;

• Rule governed • Agreed upon by the community of speakers

**What is a community of speakers? • Texters • OMG • ROFL • TTYL

• Ethnic groups • African Americans: AAE • Mexicans: Spanish

• Schools • Standard Classroom English: Language of Literacy

Why are language differences important? • If you have a code that differs in the written and oral domain your ability to resolve/manage those differences will influence how well you read!

The issues • Reading is essentially a language skill. Engaging students linguistically is necessary for literacy to develop as expected. • Students who use languages or dialects that differ from the school language or dialect are disadvantaged from the outset

Impact of Cultural Language Differences • It has been hypothesized that the mismatch between the language system spoken at home and the one used at school increases the cognitive load for students who speak other languages or dialects of English, making the process of learning to read much harder.

Impact of Cultural Language Differences • In addition, the presence of cultural dialect features can make it difficult to identify students who are having language or learning difficulties unrelated to use of a community dialect.

African American English • Also called: • AAVE • BE • NNE • And (egads!) Ebonics

What is it – really?? A systematic, rule-governed variation of English Used by most (but not all) African Americans in the United States Developed as an oral language with no written counterpart A low prestige dialect whose legitimacy is still debated in some circles

Language status • Considered by many to be a poor reproduction of Standard English • The effect of speaking a different dialect or language can be particularly problematic if it is a low prestige dialect.

African American English

WHAT DOES IT DO?

Adds and deletes morphemes  Zero Possessive

 I ride in my brother car

 Zero Past Tense

 And then he fix__ the food

 Zero Plural

 A girl puttin’ some glass_ on the table.

• Third person singular -s

 Sometimes she wear__ a baseball cap.

Transforms the main verb or verb phrase  Deletion of the copula/auxiliary  Subject-Verb Agreement

 He __ runnin’ fast  He __ hungry.  They was lookin’ for the big dog.

 Habitual be • He be gettin’ some ice cream  Remote past been  I been knowin’ how to swim.

Changes pronouns • Undifferentiated pronoun case

• Them pullin’ them up the hill.”

• Regularized reflexive

• He hurt hisself when he fell off his bike • My mama she took me to the movies

• Appositive Pronoun

Impacts Phonology  f /θ , v/ð and t/ θ in intervocalic and postvocalic positions

 Wif/with; bave/bathe; wit/with

 d/ð in prevocalic positions

 Dis/this; dem/them

 Consonant cluster reduction

 Col-/cold  Hol-/hold

African American English

WHY DOES THIS MATTER FOR READING AND WRITING?

Reading and Writing • Because we tend to read and write the way we talk • We perceive language and sounds the same way we use them, so • Spelling is affected • Writing is affected • Reading is affected • Childrens’ perceptions of the rules for spelling, writing and reading and the way that language is used are also affected!!

The Basis of Reading Deficits in African American Children: An LD Research Innovation Hub Julie A. Washington Georgia State Univ

Mark S. Seidenberg Univ of WI-Madison

Nicole Patton Terry Georgia State Univ

Funded by National Institutes of Health – Eunice Shriver National Institute on Child Health and Human Development

Nature of the Problem • Decades of descriptive, experimental and intervention research have resulted in significant advancements in the science of reading and Reading Disabilities • Despite these advances, the reading difficulties of AA children have continued unabated, and this has been true in both urban and suburban contexts • AA children are underrepresented in studies focused on targeted populations that have significant difficulty with reading acquisition and are nearly absent in studies focused on LD. • In fact, the exclusionary criteria for LD nationally restricts children from diagnosis whose learning problems are “…primarily the result of… environmental, cultural, or economic disadvantage.”

Our Hypothesis • We hypothesize that the interaction between known variables (related to language and cognitive ability) and cultural dialect will be most informative for understanding RD in AA children, regardless of poverty status. • In this view, dialectal variation is not a deficit but a language difference that affects reading acquisition in ways that need to be better understood. • The definition of RD/Dyslexia needs to be expanded to include these students!

Distinguish 3 groups • African American students from low and middle income backgrounds who are reading well (or at least at grade level) • African American students who are reading below grade level expectations because of poverty, environment, etc.. but who are not truly reading disabled • African American students who have true reading disabilities.

Distinguish 3 possibilities 1.

2.

3.

Reading difficulties are strongly determined by oral language abilities. Although correlated with SES (Hoff, 2012), spoken language is the main predictor of literacy outcomes across SES. Reading difficulties are mainly associated with use of a nonmainstream dialect. Coping with dialect variation imposes additional demands on AAE speakers, which contribute to the “reading achievement gap”. Dialect and oral language ability may have independent or joint effects on reading outcomes. When a broader SES range is considered, SES becomes the major predictor of reading outcomes. In group studies, AA children will perform more poorly overall because of overrepresentation in the lower income stratum. Disambiguating these income effects in order to allow examination of the impact of poverty on reading outcomes, independent of oral language proficiency or dialect use, and vice versa.

How is the Pie Really Cut??

Normal Readers RD LSES Readers

Code Switching • One of the differences between low income African American children and their peers is that children from low income backgrounds who use AAE often do not learn to “shift” from the use of AAE to the use of the classroom language system • Those students who demonstrate dialect awareness and engage in dialect shifting behavior without explicit instruction tend to achieve better reading outcomes as well as better outcomes in phonological awareness and vocabulary development. • Craig, et al (2009) found that AAE usage frequency was inversely related to reading ability.

Code-Switching • At school entry, LSES preschoolers who were the heaviest AAE feature producers, were also producing the most advanced syntax and semantics (Craig & Washington, 1994; 1995). • This advantage disappears almost immediately after children enter school!

Code-switching • Students who have not learned to use the school language code by the end of third grade are one or more grade levels behind by the time they get to 4th or 5th grade! • Approximately 2/3 of children will learn the code through exposure.

School Language and Reading Identifying and acknowledging the role of the home language is critical if progress is to be made toward improvement of poor reading performance. Research provides the information that teachers and other practitioners need to make informed decisions about how to proceed, what to target, and when to begin.

School Language and Reading • “…In order to bring (African Americans) into the mainstream of American society, schools must take into account the existence of a ''home language'' if it is different from standard English.” -Federal District Judge Charles W. Joiner

(The Ann Arbor Black English decision, 1979)