Despite a wealth of scholarship documenting its linguistic complexity, students in the United States are rarely encouraged to speak or write in African American Language (AAL) in their primary classrooms. The authors documented how one teacher and his highly diverse second-grade class examined, explored, and experimented with AAL in an…

Researchers consistently find a correlation between low literacy levels and high school dropout rates, expulsion, reading achievement, and failing grades for African American males. Low literacy achievement in African American males may result from multiple factors, including dialectic linguistic differences and/or phonological awareness…

Over the years, less attention is given to students' spelling skills compared to other areas of literacy achievement like word reading and passage comprehension in relationship to nonmainstream dialect usage. Considering that English spelling is based on the phonological and morphological structures of Mainstream American English (MAE), it is…

This study explored the spelling skills of African American second graders who produced African American English (AAE) features in speech. The children (N = 92), who varied in spoken AAE use and word reading skills, were asked to spell words that contained phonological and morphological dialect-sensitive (DS) features that can vary between AAE and…

Purpose: To evaluate the role of dialect on phonemic awareness and nonword spelling tasks. These tasks were selected for their reliance on phonological and orthographic processing, which may be influenced by dialect use. Method: Eighty typically developing African American children in Grades 1 and 3 were first screened for dialect use and then…

The evidence of a general achievement gap, and more specifically, a reading gap between African American students and White students is a well documented and alarming phenomenon (Chatterji, 2006; Darling-Hammond, 2004, 2007; Darling-Hammond, Holtzman, Gatlin & Heilig, 2005; Fishback & Baskin, 1991; Jencks & Phillips, 1998; Haycock, 2001;…

This study compared phonological features of African American English speakers at 3 grade levels: preschool, elementary school, and middle school. The phonological features exhibited at all 3 grade levels were quite similar. The frequency of usage, determined by the percentage of speakers exhibiting the feature and by the mean number of…