African American Vernacular English Paper

Nearly every American speaks some dialect of English that varies from Standard American English (SAE); however, although dialects are entirely acceptable variants of English, some dialectal speakers experience increased difficultly, such as negative stigmas and intelligibility issue, due to their speech patterns. This is often the case for speakers of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), which is spoken by most but not all African Americans. AAVE differs from SAE in the syntax, phonology, semantics, and pragmatics (Pearson, Conner, & Jackson, 2012). Moreover, due to the differences in the language systems, children speaking AAVE often experience difficulty when entering school. Specifically, African American children often struggle when learning to read and spell and have decreased phonological skills when compared to their SAE speaking counterparts. Due to the dialectal differences, some children are misdiagnosed with a learning or language disability when one is not present.
Discussion
A. Topics
1. Effects on Reading
a. 0333Children who use AAVE produced AAVE when reading texts written in SAE
(Craig, Thompson, Washington, & Potter, 2004)
b. African American children using AAVE have trouble learning to read (Craig et al., 2004)
c. The children producing more AAVE had less accuracy and rate when reading but no deficits in comprehension (Craig et al., 2004)
2. Effects on Spelling
a. Kohler et al. (2007) Study Summary
i. To evaluate the effect of AAVE on the phonemic awareness and spelling performance in young children, Kohler et al. evaluated the performance of 80 African American first through third graders on a phonological processing task and a nonword spelling task. The research team found that children who used AAVE more frequently performed worse on the nonword spelling task than the children who used AAVE less frequently. For the children in third grade, the research team concluded the nonword spelling task was more sensitive to the effects of dialect than the phonemic awareness task. The research team concluded that both phonemic awareness and spelling are influenced by dialects and are crucial to literacy skills.
b. Use of AAVE correlates with difficulty spelling dialect sensitive words (Patton-Terry & Connor, 2010
c. Younger children had more trouble spelling nonwords than older children (Kohler et al., 2007)
d. Reading ability influences spelling (Patton-Terry & Connor, 2010)
e. Some words and features are harder to spell for young children regardless of dialect (Patton-Terry & Connor, 2010; Kohler et al., 2007)
3. Phonological Awareness
a. Connor and Craig (2006) Study Summary:
i.
The research team aimed to evaluate the early literacy skills in 63 African American preschool students; the participants were drawn from two Head Start preschools in the same suburban and urban area. The research team evaluated the children’s dialectal use and their linguistic performance during an oral narrative. The participants were evaluated on their vocabulary skill to determine the effect of vocabulary in the early linguistic development. The research team found that children who used AAVE more frequently and less frequently outperformed the children who used AAVE with moderate frequency. The research team concluded that the early linguistic skills of children, such as phonological awareness, contributed heavily to literacy development. Moreover, the researchers concluded that children as early as preschool age learn to code shift between AAVE and
SAE. ii. b. Children with frequent AAVE use chose dialect sensitive responses on the phonological awareness tasks (Mansour-Mitri & Patton-Terry, 2013)
c. Phonological awareness skill directly correlates with reading and spelling skills (Mansour-Mitri & Patton-Terry, 2013; Kohler et al., 2007; Connor & Craig, 2006).
d. Deficits due to AAVE: naming letters, identifying rhymes, and identifying vocabulary words (Mansour-Mitri & Patton-Terry, 2013; Connor & Craig, 2006). Conclusion
• African American Vernacular English can cause deficits in the literacy and language abilities of children due to mismatches between their language systems and the language systems used in schools. o Children who used AAVE more frequently experienced more deficits than children who use AAVE less frequently o Older children had less dialect sensitive errors in all three areas compared to younger kids
 Indicates improvement in familiarity with the SAE language system as time in school increases o Each of the three areas above are codependent on one another o The results indicate a uniform effect on the reading, spelling, and phonological awareness in kids
• Where to go from here: o Further research some areas
 Reading Ability o Find more studies with non-AAVE speaking controls
 Most studies use children speaking AAVE in different amounts and frequencies