Struggling Readers Who Speak African-American English Need Support—And Respect

Telling kids the way they speak is "wrong" can have unintended negative consequences.

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Many Black children may face additional hurdles in learning to read because of differences between the dialect they’re used to and the language used in classrooms and books.

As recounted in an article in The Atlantic, when Julie Washington was a newly minted Ph.D. in speech pathology, she found herself reading Are You My Mother? to a four-year-old Black girl at a school near Detroit. The book consists of a series of scenes that go something like this:

“Are you my mother?” the baby bird asked the cow.

“How could I be your mother?” said the cow. “I am a cow.”

When she finished reading, Washington asked the child to retell the story. The girl hesitated a moment and then began: “Is you my mama? I ain’t none a yo’ mama.”

Merely charmed at first, Washington later realized what an extraordinary cognitive effort it took for the child to absorb the story in a version of English she didn’t speak and then translate it into her own version to retell it. It occurred to Washington that having to jump through those cognitive hoops could pose serious problems for many Black children—and help explain the persistent gap in reading test scores between them and their white peers.

That insight put Washington on an academic path that has led, most recently, to an article in American Educator, the magazine published by the American Federation of Teachers, co-authored with cognitive scientist Mark Seidenberg. Washington and Seidenberg explain that African American English (AAE) differs from what they call General American English (GAE)—avoiding the term “standard”—in ways that can make it harder to grasp the correspondences between spoken and written language.

For example, it’s crucial for kids to be able to hear the individual sounds in words in order to connect them to letters. if a teacher is asking whether the words cold and hole have the same ending, a child who pronounces cold as cole might say yes. If a teacher is showing how sounds are blended to form the word gold, a child who says the word as gole has to translate the version of the word written on the board to the one she’s used to using.

Teachers need to understand that AAE-speakers may read or respond to questions more slowly, the authors say, not because they’re less capable but because they need more time to translate between dialects. And while children need to learn GAE in order to read, write, and communicate orally in certain settings, teachers should avoid making them feel that AAE is incorrect or inferior.

It has long been known, at least among linguists, that AAE—or “Black English,” as it has sometimes been called—has its own rules and conventions, as does GAE. True, it’s not a separate language, like Spanish, but Washington and Seidenberg argue that navigating the more subtle differences between AAE and GAE can pose even greater challenges for kids learning to read and write. And yet, they say, AAE-speakers are generally cut less slack in literacy instruction than speakers of other languages.

At the same time, programs designed to help speakers of other languages grasp English grammar can also help AAE-speakers. After one majority-Black elementary school that Washington studied implemented a “bilingual curriculum,” the number of students who passed state reading tests increased by 75%.

The issue of language variation—including the terms used to describe it—has long been politically fraught. While linguists draw a technical distinction between a dialect and a language on the basis of mutual intelligibility, one linguist quipped long ago that “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” (He was thinking of Yiddish, which used to be dismissed as merely a dialect.) Washington and Seidenberg reject the term standard English because it implies that other varieties are “substandard,” and they prefer language variety to dialect because of negative associations with the latter.

To some, this carefulness about terminology might sound like performative overkill, but it may be necessary to counteract the longstanding view that AAE is simply incorrect English—even among many within the Black community. When, early in her career, Washington was trying to get parental consent to study children who spoke what she then called “Black English,” she encountered opposition. “What the hell is ‘Black English’?” one mother asked her angrily. “We don’t speak Black English!” When Washington—who is Black—then switched to AAE, the parents sheepishly admitted they did use that variety, but they didn’t like the label.

A poignant example of how sensitive Black children can be to correction of their speech is the story of Dasani, told in a recent book that has been excerpted in The New York Times Magazine. At age 13 Dasani wins a full scholarship to a well-regarded boarding school for children who, like her, live in poverty. She has a hard time adjusting for a number of reasons, but a salient one is her feeling that pressure to speak “standard English” is robbing her of her identity.

Dasani’s family soon notices she’s no longer dropping the final “g” in words, and during a phone call her sisters tell her, “You sound so white right now.” Dasani’s mother veers between thinking her daughter is now “talking with some class” to jokingly telling her “we coming to steal you” because of the changes in her speech. Although Dasani has Black mentors who advise her that she can learn to “code-switch” and still remain the same person, she doesn’t see it that way. “If I talk the way I naturally talk—to them—like, something’s wrong with me,” she says. Eventually, she acts out in ways that lead to her expulsion from the school.

Dasani’s experience may have been particularly difficult because of the immersive nature of the school: students live in surrogate families with house parents who require the use of GAE around the clock. It may be easier for children to code-switch when they can slip back into the language variety they’re used to at home. But even in the typical school environment, teachers need to be able to teach GAE without conveying the idea that AAE is inferior.

It’s also important to understand that oral language variation, and the challenges it brings, exists on a continuum. Not all Black children speak AAE, and Washington and Seidenberg say that those who speak a “denser” variety need more support to code-switch.

Language variation is also intertwined with poverty. The authors point out that nearly all high-density AAE speakers come from low-income families. And while the prejudice against AAE may be particularly damaging, many students of other races who live in poverty speak versions of English that differ to some extent from the version found in books. It would be interesting to know whether they too face additional challenges connecting spoken language to print.

Beyond that, it’s worth remembering that because of deficiencies in their training, teachers often use methods of reading instruction that don’t work even for many GAE-speakers. Because they don’t teach phonics effectively, those approaches are even less likely to work for speakers of other varieties of English.

And because written language is generally more complex than spoken language, all children need to become familiar with its peculiar syntax and conventions, initially through listening to adults read aloud. Those read-alouds, along with classroom discussion, should also be organized in a way that enables all children to acquire the academic knowledge and vocabulary they’ll need to understand complex text. Unfortunately, most elementary schools aren’t using curricula that meet those criteria.

In short, learning to read can be an enormously difficult task—and learning to write is even harder. If there are ways to make acquiring those vital abilities easier for children, including the many who speak AAE, we need to start implementing them as quickly and effectively as possible.

This post originally appeared on Forbes.com.