LANGUAGE, LITERACY, AND
LINGUISTIC DIFFERENCES
Julie A . Washington, Ph.D.
Georgia State Univer sity
July 22, 2013
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 COMMUNIT Y 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!
MY CONCERNS
Reading is essentially a language skill.
Engaging the student 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.
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
MY ADDITIONAL CONCERN
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
 Zero Past Tense
 Zero Plural
 Third person singular s
 I ride in my brother
car
 And then he fix__ the
food
 A girl puttin’ some
glass_ on the table.
 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
 Remote past been
 He be gettin’ some ice
cream
 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 are also affected!!
AAE AND READING (CRAIG &
WASHINGTON, 2003)
 Performance of 65 typically developing 2 nd
through 5 th graders in an Urban community:
13 2 nd graders
27 3 rd graders
11 4 th graders
14 5 th graders
32 boys and 33 girls
30% overall were low income
 Gray Oral Reading Test-3 (GORT-3)
AAE AND READING
GORT-3:
13 passages consisting of one topic
centered paragraph;
Passages vary in length, syntactic
complexity, and vocabulary difficulty as
test progresses;
Appropriate for children 7:0 – 18:11
years of age;
AAE AND READING
Passages were scored twice:
once to identify all variations from print
(miscues) and,
 then to identify variations that were
consistent with AAE
Self corrections were examined further
for their relationship to AAE
AAE AND READING
RESULTS
60/65 students (92%) used AAE during oral
reading;
Of 1,740 variations from print, 21% could be
characterized as AAE features
Low, negative correlation between overall use
of dialect and Accuracy (r = -.35, p = .006),
and Rate (r = -.26, p = .04)
That is, as use of AAE increased, rate and
accuracy decreased.
AAE AND READING
CONCLUSIONS
AAE is produced while reading SAE texts
aloud;
Some students appeared to improve SAE
accuracy in a trade-off with rate
Reading text as it is written takes an
extra level of effort; penultimate
paragraphs had the most dialect.
AAE AND WRITING
 African American students use AAE in writing if they use it in
oral language
 African American students who can write in SAE can also
speak SAE
 Writing is both a bridge and a mirror into code-switching with
African American students
AAE AND WRITING: 3 RD GRADE SAMPLE
(UNEDITED)
October 12, 2007
Writing Journal
My Mom
One day me and my mom was (were) at home because we
was(were) about to go. I went outside. I was waiting. I
open(ed) the garage and get(got) my bike out. I went ride?? for
a minite(minute) and nobody was out. So I went back inside
and went to my mom(‘s) room and she was watching TV and I
tune(d) off to TV and tooed(told) my mom to stop watching TV.
So we had play(ed) a game call lonede. My mom had mast up
3 time(s) on the game and she got it write. Then we went to
the store. I had buy(bought) some chips, candy and a juice.
AAE AND WRITING: 7 TH GRADE (3 RD AND
FINAL EDIT)
Dear, cafeteria manager
I pay two dollars and fifty cent(s) every day, and I
want my lunch to be good if it cost(s) so much.
The lunch makes my stomach hurt, and I have no
energy after I am done eating lunch. Three
thing(s) I think we should eat at lunch is(are)…
#1 FRUIT fruit is healthy, and taste(s) better than
the food we eat in are(our) lunch. We have some
fruit in are(our) lunch, but we don’t have enough.
We have peaches and oranges, but we don’t have
fruit like apples, bananas, or cherries. Everybody
needs more than two varieties of fruit.
#2 DRINKS we should have different varieties to
dring. All we have to drink is plain or chocolate
mile. Some times I want bottle(d) water or koolaid. Some times the milk is spoiled to. If we had
orange juice or something more people would eat
lunch.
African American English
Standard Classroom English
CODE-SWITCHING
CODE-SWITCHING
Code
• a language
variety
Language variety
• a dialect,
language,
linguistic
style, or
prosodic
register.
Code-switching –
• alternation
by a
speaker
between
two or more
language
varieties
CODE-SWITCHING
Influenced by contextual variables
including:
Speaker characteristics: age,
race/ethnicity, status, gender
“Codes emerge from interaction, and
become relevant when parties to
discourse treat them as such” (Nilep,
2006).
CODE-SWITCHING
At school entry, LSES preschoolers who
were the heaviest feature producers,
were also producing the most advanced
syntax and semantics (Craig &
Washington, 1994; 1995).
This advantage disappears almost
immediately after children enter school!
DIALECT DENSIT Y DURING READING
(CRAIG, THOMPSON, WASHINGTON &
POTTER, 2004)
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 4 th or 5 th
grade!
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 dif ferent from
standard English.”
- Federal District Judge Charles W. Joiner
(The Ann Arbor Black English decision, 1979)