Purpose: Syntax provides critical support for both academic success and linguistic growth, yet it has not been a focus of language research in school-age African American children. This study examines complex syntax performance of African American children in second through fifth grades. Method: The current study explores the syntactic…

The linguistic awareness/flexibility hypothesis posits that children with better metalinguistic knowledge have improved reading related academic performance. To date, no research has analyzed the effect of morphological or phonological interventions on improving metalinguistic competence for nonstandard dialect users. Sixteen typically developing…

The purpose of this longitudinal study was to examine the influence of spoken dialect density on writing and on the codevelopment of reading and writing in African American English-speaking (AAE) children from first through fifth grades. The sample included 869 students, ranging in age from 5.8 to 12.5 years. Results indicated that dialect density…

African American English has a rich oral tradition, with identifiable features across all 5 systems of language--phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. This is an investigation of the extent to which pragmatic features of African American oral storytelling traditions are apparent in the written stories of African American…

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…

This quantitative correlational study examines the role of African American English (AAE) and literacy for Black American students who speak AAE. No previous research regarding Black American students who speak AAE has set out to determine whether or not viewing Black students who speak AAE as English second language learners (L2) would improve…