Reading comprehension, defined as the active extraction and construction of meaning from all kinds of text, requires children to fluently decode and understand what they are reading. Basic processes underlying reading comprehension are complex and call on the oral language system and a conscious understanding of this system, i.e., metalinguistic…

Purpose: In this study, the authors evaluated the contribution made by dialect shifting to reading achievement test scores of African American English (AAE)-speaking students when controlling for the effects of socioeconomic status (SES), general oral language abilities, and writing skills. Method: Participants were 165 typically developing…

This article describes an ethnographic study of the process of collecting, transcribing, translating, retelling, and adapting of a traditional Yup'ik story for a children's bilingual picture book, which is part of a culturally based math curriculum project, Math in a Cultural Context (MCC). The article opens with an overview of MCC and the role…

Relationships among African American English (AAE), linguistic knowledge, and spelling skills were examined in a sample of 92 children in grades one through three whose speech varied in the frequency of morphosyntactic AAE features. Children were separated into groups of high (AAE speakers) and low (standard American English, SAE, speakers) use of…