Teaching Reading to Children Who Speak African American English

I am Julie Washington. I'm a professor in the School of Education at the University of California, Irvine campus. By clinical training, I'm a speech language pathologist, which means I'm interested in all things language related when it comes to reading. My particular interest is in how language variation impacts our ability to teach reading with African American children. So I'm going to talk about some of the issues related to language variation, what it means for children, and how they approach the reading process. I like to start always by talking about the definitions that I'm using. So what is language variation? Language variation is differences in language use by region, by race, by ethnicity. So some of the kinds of language variation you might be familiar with are Southern English, Spanglish, Chicano English, and I'm going to talk about African American English, which differs by race. Another term that we use for talking about language variation is dialect.

So dialects are language variation within a language, and dialects are rule-governed variations of a language that differ by region of the country, by different countries, by different states, and in different cities. So regionally, they can differ at really small levels — like New York City has its own dialect — or we can talk about dialects that differ by race and ethnic groups. Another thing about dialects that's really important is that where there are languages, there are dialects, and the more languages you have, the more dialects you're going to encounter. I like to talk about what dialects are because I think it's also really important to talk about what they're not. Dialects are not slang. They are not ungrammatical. They are not incorrect. And that turns out to be really important when we start talking about reading in children from different cultural backgrounds, because your view of a child's language system is going to impact how you address it when you encounter it in a classroom.

The other important thing about dialects, we tend to think about dialects just in the way they sound — like Southern English is a dialect — but the reality is that dialect impacts every domain or element of language. So there's morphology, which many of us know is the smallest unit of meaning in a word. Morphology is really impacted by dialects. In the case of African American children, for example, sometimes morphemes are there, sometimes they're not. Phonology is the smallest unit of sound in a language. Anyone who teaches reading knows what phonology is, and phonology is really impacted by dialect variation. Then there's syntax, which is sentence structure. There's pragmatics, which is the use of language, and semantics, which we tend to just think about as vocabulary. But for children from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds, what words mean, how they're used, can be very different from one group to another.

So they are also impacted by dialect and by the community that you come from. So one of the questions I get a lot is ... do I speak a dialect? A lot of people think they don't speak a dialect, but I'm here to tell you that everybody in the United States speaks a dialect. There are dialects all over the country. Even somebody like me who comes from Seattle, people think that Seattle has no dialect. Of course they do. It's called the Pacific Northwest dialect. There's also dialects in the south, the southeastern dialect. There's the dialect of Louisiana, which is really special, and the dialect of cities within Louisiana like New Orleans that sound very, very different. And so when you look around the country, we all speak some kind of language variation, some kind of dialect. One of the things you'll always hear us say when we're talking about a dialect or a language is that they are rule governed.

So there are rules for how language is used. There are rules for how dialect is used, with whom it's used, why it's used for what purpose. And so when we talk about the rule-governed nature, we're talking about both languages and dialects. Languages have words that are produced to represent actions, objects and words. They're finite combinations, and we all know the rules. Even if you can't tell me what the rules of language are, I promise you, you know them. A lot of people love this new word game Wordle. You can't play Wordle unless you know the rules of English. So you know when you see a 'q' that an 'f' can't come next. When you see an 's', you know that there are some sounds that can't come next in English. And so that's our knowledge of the finite combinations of sounds in letters. The other thing that's really important about language, especially when we're talking about reading, is that language is innate.

So humans are wired to produce language. You come into the world wired to produce language, and with few exceptions, like in the case of language impairments, most children will talk as long as you're getting some kind of input in your environment — whether it's good input or not — children will talk. We will all talk. And so that's very important to remember about language. It is innate. Why is it important? Because reading's not, which is something that we'll talk about. Reading is a learned skill. Language is an innate skill that you're born to use. Language is also agreed upon by members of a community. That's a really important element of language because when we start talking about dialects and language varieties, they develop within communities, within families, within social groups. And so the people who belong to these groups agree, this is how we use language. This is what's correct, this is what's good for us.

And when they get to school, we tend to think of school as just an educational context, but it's also another communication context. So for example, if you think about some of the more basic things about school that count as communication — you may not talk without raising your hand — that is a basic communication idea in a school, and it's agreed upon by the community of speakers. Who are — who is the community of speakers? The teachers, the children, the principal, everybody who's in the school. So when we think about a community of speakers, every time a child goes from one linguistic system to another, they have to figure out what the rules are in that system. And when you're talking about children who use dialects, who come from communities that are using a very different language system, those children are often comparing what you are doing with what they already know.

And so when we think about children who come to school and who are using dialects like African American English, one of the takeaways I want you to have about those kids is that when they show up, they are expert language users. They are experts in the system that they learned in their community from their grandmothers, from their parents, from their peers, from their siblings. And what you are doing is teaching them something new. They already know something, and they know it really, really well. So our task as educators is to figure out how to map onto what they already know so that they learn what we also are trying to teach them. That's what we're doing with oral language in schools, and it is absolutely what we're doing with print. When you start teaching children to read, we know that reading has language as its foundation.

So if you're coming to reading with a language system that's different, then you have to figure out how to map your oral system onto what's being taught in writing. And so dialects are really important for that reason. When we're thinking about teaching reading, and that's really what we're talking about here for African American kids in particular, when you are teaching an African American child to read and they come to school using African American English — and we'll talk about what those features look like — you cannot ignore the use of that dialect when you teach reading. We cannot teach children to read well without integrating into our teaching the system that they bring with them, because they're already experts in that system. And so when we start talking about dialect, it's a language variety that children are learning in their homes, in their communities. It's the ones spoken by their parents, their grandparents, their siblings, and the children that they interact with before they come to school. And then they get there

and can you imagine? Just like, we seem to understand that when we talk about variety across languages. So we know that when a child comes to school and they spoke Chinese at home and we speak English at school, we're very aware that there's a transition to be made. But the kids that we don't think about are the ones who speak English, but they use a variety of English that's different than print and that's different than the variety that's used in a school. And so it's really important for us, I think, as we're thinking about how to teach reading to all children in a way that affirms and supports who they are and makes them good readers, that we have to incorporate the language that kids are bringing with them. Easier said than done, especially for varieties like African American English. One of the things that people have heard me talk about a lot is that African American English, like many dialects of English, is considered low prestige.

So it's a dialect that we don't value very much. A high prestige variety is one where when we hear people speak it, we automatically attribute positive characteristics to a speaker, like British English. We hear a British accent. We think the person is, like, high class, related to Queen Elizabeth, and probably drinks tea and eats crumpets. That's a very positive, high prestige dialect. African American English on the other hand is like Southern English. When we hear people with a southern accent ... all of a sudden it's, oh my god, they're rednecks. They are not well-educated. They're probably not very open-minded. Those are biases that go along with the way people talk, and that is a low prestige bias. And we see the same thing with African American kids. If you have a child come into your school who's four and is using verbs differently, is removing the endings of words, you think, oh my goodness, they're ungrammatical.

And what I'm asking you to do is to step back and think, perhaps this is a variety of English that's being used differently than the one that we use at school, and respect and honor what children are bringing to school. That's really, really important. I keep talking about African American English, and so what is it? Remember the first part of the definition of dialect or language is a systematic, rule-governed variation of English. It is spoken by most African American people in the United States, but not all of them. Some African American people don't speak African American English at all. What we have learned in our research, though, is that if you are low income, you likely speak it. 99% of the kids that we encounter who are growing up in poverty speak African American English. Why? Well, often varieties of English develop because of isolation or living together in a specific sphere.

It could be a state. It can be a city. It can be a block. It can be a community. It can be anything where you have a group of people who are alike and who are learning to use language together. And so what we see with low income families is that because kids are not very mobile when they're growing up in poverty, the linguistic system that they bring to school absolutely is going to be the one from the community. Why not middle income kids? They do, too, but the difference is that because they're moving in and out of the community, we often see their ability to select codes, to switch from one system to another depending on the context. Many of our kids growing up in poverty will learn that skill when they get to school. Some of them will. Some of them won't. But they typically are trying to learn it when they get to school.

And so how do we help them select the one that they need in order to succeed at reading and writing? That's what we're concerned about, and that's what we're interested in. Children need our help. They need our support. Remember ... reading is taught. And so if you're talking about a child who comes to reading from a system that is very different, we're talking about children who need more time, more practice, more opportunity to learn this new system without being judged, without being taught that it's ungrammatical, without some of the baggage that we see come along with African American English. And we see this in young children I have to say, but I'm a university professor, and I have been really, really disturbed by how many African American young adults believe that their home language system is inferior, that it's something that they need to get rid of, that it's something that's not desirable.

They have not been taught that in their communities. Most of them have been taught that in school ... that this is not the way we use language; that's not grammatical. And so by the time I see them at the university, they're using so much effort to try to suppress the language system that they're using verbally in their homes and communities that we silence people, we silence children, we silence young adults. And so we want to approach this differently. Yes, children need to learn the language of print, they need to learn the language of classroom. But the question is ... how do we get them there without crushing them, without doing harm? That's the conversation we want to have around language variety and reading. So now I'm going to talk about African American English. What is it and how does it connect to General American English? And, importantly for children,

how does it change what you expect to see or hear as a teacher when children come into the classroom? So it is rule governed, remember, so we know which aspects of language are going to be impacted by African American English. I've said morphemes. It adds and deletes morphemes. So you can delete the 's' from a plural. So you can say "two dog" instead of "two dogs." The important thing, though, is that a child who removes that 's' has indicated that it's plural already when you say "two." And so in English, really, it's kind of redundant. When you say "two dog," you don't lose any meaning cause we know there are two of them. You can also delete the past tense '-ed'. And in that case, what we tend to see children do is mark it somewhere else. So if I say, "Yesterday I jumped over the fence," I can say, "Yesterday I jump over the fence," because even when I delete that '-ed', I've already said "yesterday,"

so you know I'm talking about the past. And that's really important because children who use language well are not ambiguous. You know what they're saying. You know what they mean. Children are still expert language users even when morphemes are not present because a child who's an expert language user will make sure that you understand the message at all times, and that's what happens with African American children. When I remove third person singular 's', plural 's', past tense '-ed' ... I mark it somewhere else in the discourse so that you can always follow right along with me. That's really important for oral language. When we start talking about writing, children write the way that they use language. And so if I am not using past tense '-ed' in my oral language, I will also omit it in writing. And so when we start thinking about teaching writing, we have to think about morphology.

Morphology is very important in writing, and children need to learn it; but understand that when a child who is African American and speaks African American English comes to school, they may or may not be producing the past tense '-ed', the plural 's', the third person singular 's'. And so it's important for us to think about what those children are doing as being part of their language system. And what we need to do is to extend what they're doing to include the morphemes that they're going to encounter in print; and we need for them to learn how to include them when they're writing, because the thing about writing that's so different from oral language and is different with reading an oral language is that those final morphemes are always included. And the term we use for that is "obligatory." They are obligatory. So when you're talking, you can variably include them depending on the context; but when you're writing, we want you to learn how to include them all the time.

And so when we think about children who are using dialects, the way that they use language, the way that they interpret print, the way that they spell will be influenced by what they're doing orally; and that is appropriate. The other thing that African American English impacts is the verb phrase. The most common feature of African American English is difference in the subject and verb agreement in an English sentence. And really commonly, it's "was" and "were." "They was going to the store" instead of "They were going to the store." If you know African American children who are using African American English, they will likely be doing that. The next most common feature is variable inclusion of forms of the verb "to be" ... "is" and "are." So you can say "This a car," "She going to the store" ... and that's appropriate in African American English. It is the way we use language when we are talking to our friends and our family; and because you're an expert at it, when you come to school, you'll be — I'll be using it when I talk to my teacher, as well, because that is the way that I use language. And it's fine, but what we need to do as teachers is to teach children to also learn subject-verb agreement as it appears in print.

We need to teach them to include "is" and "are" when they are reading aloud. And so what we're doing for children is extending what they know about language from the oral domain to what they need to know in the written domain for reading, for writing, for spelling. Other forms that may be impacted in terms of the verb for African American kids ... a lot of people know the habitual "be." We hear that so much. "He be." "She be." "They be." "Your dog be." "Everybody be." It's the use of "be" in its unconjugated form when you're talking about something that happens all the time. That's what we mean by habitual. So when I say, "He be eatin' ice cream," I don't mean, "He is eating ice cream." I mean, "He be eatin' ice cream all the time." That's what habitual "be" means: "He be going to the store every day."

That's what that means. So it's a different meaning that kids are conveying when they're using "be" in this way. And even if you don't know that that's the meaning that it's conveying, I promise you the kids know ... that they know that that's how you use this word and that's what it means when you're using it. We're not necessarily trying to change the way that children talk. We are trying to teach them to read. That's our goal. It is to read, and so whatever we need to do in order to teach reading, we do. But we want to do it in a way that affirms, respects, and understands the child's home language system. Now there's a group of features that I actually really like. I call them "other" because they don't impact morphology, they don't impact the verb, but you hear them so much with African American kids. One of them — we talk about words that express imminent action:

"I'm fitna do something"; "I'm sposeta do something"; "I'm bouta do something." All of them basically mean the same thing. I'm getting ready to do something soon, right now. "Fitna" is one that people from the south might recognize. When you are a southerner and you speak Southern English, you are "fixing to do something." When you're a child and you're African American English and you're from the south or the Midwest or the Pacific Northwest, you are "fitna do something"; and it means the same thing as "fixing to." We call them catenatives. It's like "gunna" and "hafta." Those are also catenatives. And so "fixing to," "spose to," "bout to" — imminent action. I'm getting ready to do something. Another feature of African American English that comes into this category of "other" is multiple negation ... the use of negatives in a sentence. When we first started doing this work around dialect, the focus was on adults, and so we used to call it double negation.

Then we started working with children and learned that you can use as many negatives as you can get into a sentence. You can use five. You can use six. And the more you use, the more negative it is. One of my favorite examples is "He ain't never got no money no how." That means he never has money. So the more negatives you use, the more profoundly negative it is. So with children, they're really creative with their use of these features; and you hear more than two negatives in adults, too, but children can really go for it.

So there are lots of things we've learned about dialect over the years. Low income children use more dialect than middle income children. We've known that for a long time. Being in an impoverished environment often means that you don't have a lot of experiences outside your community, and a result of that is that a lot of children use a lot more dialect. And that doesn't mean that dialect is impoverished, it's just an artifact of being in a community. It happens across every community. The other thing that we know generally about African American English is that boys use more dialect than girls, and we start to see that as young five years old. And how do we explain that? I'm not really sure. When we found it, it was many years ago. And what the explanation was — we see in the adult literature — is that men use more dialect than women because women are more likely to be in jobs where they're interacting with the public and kind of have to learn to use General American English.

Well, we know that's not what's happening with five year olds, and so we know that for those children there's something about masculinity that's attached to being really non-standard and using these forms of African American English that really cement you to the group that you belong to. It really signals membership. And so we see that in boys much more than girls. Don't completely understand it, but we do know that there are gender differences in the use of language. We also found many years ago that, when African American kids get to school, that their use of complex language structure is really well developed. Remember I said they were expert language users? Just because ... when we get to school, we have thought of what they're doing as being so different from what we expect in print and in a school environment, that we've not given them credit for the complexity of the language that they use.

And we saw that a long time ago, that the complexity of sentences, the use of complex structures, is really, um, common in kids who use the most dialect. So the more you use dialect, the more complex your language is. And we were surprised! And in some ways that's kind of a bias, because we know in bilingual kids that the better you are at using Spanish, the better your language skills are in general and that you'll take those strong language skills and transfer them to English. And so it turns out that that's true for kids who speak dialects, as well. If you are a good strong user of the language of your community, then it shows in the complexity of the structures that you use. Our concern with African American children is that using great sentence structure should translate into better outcomes in school, and yet they don't.

And that's been a concern that we've had for a long time. If you are really good at sentences, you're really good at using language, you should be also very strong in language dependent skills like reading and writing. And yet we do not see children taking those skills that they come to school with and transferring them to these language-based skills. And the question for us has always been ... is it them or is it us? Is it the children who are having difficulty making the transition or the adults who are not accepting the way that they use language and helping them to make that transition? And I would say the latter, that we have to respect and affirm the expertise of children when they come through the door and recognize that they are not blank slates. They know a lot when they walk through the door. And if we recognize, affirm it, and learn about it, we could actually integrate it into our teaching in a way that would support them.

Another general aspect of language that we've learned with dialect speakers when it comes to reading is that if you are an African-American-English-speaking child and you're reading General American English text, you will use dialect when you read that text. Ninety percent of African American kids who are reading General American English are also mixing General American English with African American English, which is something we see in bilingual readers as well. So they're using the language that they know to learn the language that they're trying to learn. And so when African American kids are reading text, we see them using African American English. In 2004 we conducted a study where we had African American kids read aloud. And one of the things that we saw was, one, that they were using a lot of dialect; but, two, the harder the text got, the less likely they were to try to hold on to the General American English structure, because they needed their resources to understand the text — and so they were not as focused on making sure that there was a one-to-one match between their oral language and print. Instead what they were focused on was trying to make sure they understood the text. And you know what? That's the right focus, because reading is about meaning. And so what we saw in these fourth grade African American kids was that when we got to the hardest passage for them on the test, that they started really focusing on maintaining the meaning of the text and not so much just this General American English structure.

So why do we care about this? Why does language variation matter so much? Because we know that students who haven't learned the language of text by the time they're in fourth grade are at least a grade level or more behind. All of us are really familiar with the term "the achievement gap," about how African American kids are behind their peers in reading. And what I'm making a case for is the role of language in teaching reading and particularly the role of cultural language in teaching reading and improving the outcomes for African American students. This is why we care. If we looked at the scores of African American children before the pandemic, we talked a lot about what percentage of kids were functioning or reading in fourth grade at a basic level or below. Among African American students. in 2019, 81% were reading at a basic level or below. Nineteen percent were reading at a proficient level or above.

So fewer than 20% of African American kids in 2019 were reading at a proficient level or above, and then along came the pandemic. As far back as 2011, we have known that for every year that African American kids are in school, the gap in reading achievement seems to grow, so it's not getting better as children are going through school. In fact, a 2011 study by Margaret Burchinal showed that for every year that African American children were in school, they lost a 10th of a standard deviation in reading. And so the achievement gap, we have been finding over time, is not closing. In fact, it's widening. And so what are some of the reasons for this? In my own work, of course, I'm interested in language, and that's what we're talking about here. So what is it about language for children who use language varieties like African American English that contributes to this difficulty with reading?

Many years ago, and I mean a long time ago, 1969, we talked about the mismatch hypothesis. Johnson in 1969 talked about how the mismatch between oral language and print contributes to difficulty with learning to read. And we've believed that for a long time. Couldn't always prove it, but it was very clear when you look at print and you listen to children talk that they really aren't being integrated very well. But it wasn't until 2015 that I and my colleagues at the University of Wisconsin, led by Mark Seidenberg, really were able to test the mismatch hypothesis. We used a computational model, which is a theoretical model, that looks at what these mismatches are doing to the ability of this theoretical model to learn basic concepts of reading. And what we found was that in that condition, where spelling and the oral input matched, that it took the model approximately 350 trials to get to 75% mastery.

But in that case where spelling and oral language didn't match, it took more than a thousand trials to get to 75% mastery. That's the mismatch hypothesis. So we were able to prove it — that when oral language and print do not match for children, that they work so much harder to get to reading text than they would if they matched. We talk about that as the cognitive load. So the child has to work so much harder, use so many more of their cognitive resources to try to get to the print on a page. I often use an example that I learned many years ago. So I was a young assistant professor, and this little girl was four years old; and she was participating in a study that I was doing on story retells. And the book we were using was "Are You My Mother?" by P.D. Eastman.

Most people know this story, certainly most teachers do. And the book is about a baby bird that hatches from the egg, and when it hatches, looks around the nest. And the mother's not there, and the bird says, "Where's my mother?" So the baby bird jumps out of the nest, and it runs around to different people, objects, animals, and says, "Are you my mother?" And the response is always, "I am not your mother. I am a ... chicken," for example. So we read this book, and we had all these instances of "Are you my mother? I am not your mother. I am a ..." So we finished the book. We had a great time around it. It's a great book. And this little girl was going to retell the story to me. Remember she's four years old, so she can't actually read. So she opened the book, used the pictures, and she said, "Is you my mama?

I ain't none o' yo mama." And she read the whole book that way. It was hilarious. And it was fun, and we really enjoyed it. Then I went back to my office and thought about what it took for her to listen to me read this story to her in General American English, which she did not speak, to recode it and tell it back to me in the language system that was her own. And it takes so much working memory. She had to hold on to the sequence of the story. It took a lot of memory, not just working memory, and still she was able to do it. Many of our children cannot do this. This mismatch for them creates a cognitive load that they have difficulty overcoming. This little girl somehow using these pictures was able to hold onto the elements of the story and tell the story back to me.

You know what? That's a lot of work. So when you're coming to text from a system that differs from text, you have to expend a lot of energy trying to make the connection between your oral language and what you're encountering in print. Cognitive load relates to the amount of information that your working memory can handle. Since working memory has a limited capacity, that if you are spending a lot of your energy trying to do one thing, then there's not a lot left for maybe the larger task. And so it's incumbent upon us in the research environment to figure out how to present information, to present reading instruction in a way that students are able to balance the load better, so that they're able to use what they know to complete the task in front of them. And in the past we tried making text closer to African American English so that kids didn't have so far to go. But what we learned when we did that was, like many dialects, African American English is not a written system. It's an oral system.

And so it was difficult for them to make that transition, as well, cause there's like this cognitive dissonance, like ... this doesn't really match. This is not working for me. So that's probably not the answer. And I say that because I've been asked it so many times: "Why don't we just change the books?" Well, we tried that in the sixties and seventies, and it didn't work. And so we know that maybe we could do a better job now because we know so much more, but it's not clear that that's the answer. What is clear is that in order for students to read, they need to get from their oral language to the language of books. And how we do that is really important. And what we've done in the past is to suppress what they were doing orally and then try to get them to use the language of print.

And what I'm advocating for is to end that kind of suppression of what kids are doing, recognize its potential value, and extend what kids know to include what we want them to do with reading, so that we are not denigrating anybody's home language. Instead, what we're saying is, "Gosh, you know so much about this linguistic system. As an educator, I need to learn a little more about what you know, so that I can use what you know to teach you to read and write." And so that's where we're focused at this moment, and it's because of these cognitive load issues for kids that unless we do something to lessen the load, what we end up with is what we see in our data. We have a lot of children in our data who are third, fourth, and fifth grade who can read words, but they can't extract meaning from them. So they've spent so much of their energy trying to get the words right that they still are not getting the meaning from them — and are walking away thinking that being able to read individual words actually is reading and then being frustrated by the fact that they can't actually answer the questions or understand the book.

And so this is this — where are you putting your energy? If all your energy is placed on trying to get that word just right, then you don't have as much energy left to try to extract meaning from the text. So the mismatch hypothesis was really important for us to understand and to be able to confirm. However, remember what I told you at the beginning? Everybody speaks a dialect. So it can't just be about dialect. It can't just be about the mismatch between print and oral language. Well, you know what? It's not. One of the things that we have learned that is one of probably the most important things we've learned in the last 10 years is that it's not about just linguistic difference. It's about the magnitude of the difference between oral language and print. We call that dialect density. So we think about dialects as developing on a continuum.

Some kids use just a little bit of dialect and those kids we call low density dialect users. Then there are kids for whom less than 50% of the utterances that they produce are also impacted by dialect. So you hear some features, but you hear a lot of General American English. Those are sort of our moderate users. But then there's a group of kids for whom dialect is really high. More than half of their utterances are impacted by features of some dialect, in this case, African American English. Those are the children who are struggling the most with reading, because the distance between their oral language and print is so wide. We call that linguistic distance in linguistics. So the distance between what you see on a page and what you're producing is pretty wide. So you're using a lot of features that you're never going to encounter on the page, because, remember, this is an oral system; and so you're not going to see a lot of what you're doing orally on the page and you still need to figure out how to integrate it, though, in order to be a good strong reader.

And so dialect density turns out to be really, really important for kids who are learning how to read. How far away is your language from the language of the classroom and from the language of text? And for those children for whom it is very far away, it really matters. And I have to say that, as a scientist, I've been doing this for so many years, but I learned the most about dialect density when I moved to the south. So when you're living in a southern state or a southern city — I was in Atlanta — you have children who are using southern features, which is one kind of language variation. They're African American, so they're using African American features. They're putting those on top of each other. And guess what? Pretty high density dialect users, because they have a regional dialect and a cultural dialect coming together really impacting their oral language.

And those kids have oral language that is really far away from print. And so I saw a lot of struggle with reading in that population. So now in my own research program, we are really focused on high density dialect users. Speaking a dialect does not make you a poor reader. Let me say that again. Speaking a dialect does not make you a poor reader. We all speak dialects. But if you are a really dense user of dialect, getting to reading on the page is a greater cognitive load for you than it is for the child who doesn't use very much, because you have more work to do. Like the little girl with "Are you my mother?" She got there.

But if she was really using a lot of dialect in her oral language and she was listening to me, there's this mismatch that makes it harder and harder to get to print. So when we think about dialect density, we found that it impacts spelling, it impacts writing, it impacts reading, it impacts language, language testing in all the same ways. The more you use, the lower your scores are. The more you use, the harder it is for you to get to the end product. And one of the responses to that that we've heard from teachers and researchers is, "Well, then they need to stop. We need to reduce the amount of dialect they're using. We need to stop them from doing that." That's that suppression idea. We are not trying to suppress what kids are doing. We are trying to help them use what they know to learn what they need to know.

I'm going to give an example of something that I learned in South Africa, actually. It impacted my thinking almost as much as the "Are You My Mother?" example. I was working with a group of kids in a rural environment, and we were having them do speeches. And we had this competition: if you memorize this and do it well, then you get this prize. So all these kids were eager to get whatever the prize was, and so they wanted to do this memorization. So the first child who got up was a girl who was about 11, and she got up, cleared her throat, got ready to do it, and then she said, "I need to do it in my language first, and then I can do it in English." So she did the whole speech in Síphùthì, which is her village language. She did it flawlessly, and then she looked at me and said, "Now I can do it in English."

And she did it flawlessly. I learned so much from watching her, how she used her home language to support her ability to do this task in English. And we know that our colleagues in South Africa are looking at this a lot, that they have all these official languages, and so they have all these children in their context who need to be able to use one language to support learning in a different one. That's what we're talking about with dialect speakers. As I said earlier, we understand this when kids speak different languages, but within language variation has the same impact. And those kids need the same consideration, that when you're using a variation of English that is far away from print, you need the same consideration for learning how to read as someone who's coming to reading from a different language. I know the question that everybody's asking now: how do we do this?

And the answer to that question starts with respecting the language that kids bring to school. You can't teach kids anything about integrating language if you believe that their language is ungrammatical or that it's wrong: "It's not the Queen's English, and so you just need to suppress it." I want us to get suppression out of our thinking as educators, because it is possible for children to learn to use the language variety in school without having their own language variety suppressed. We can teach children to read without getting rid of African American English, Appalachian English, Southern English, and instead incorporating it. So that challenge is to balance the need for kids to learn the language of the classroom with the need to respect the language of home to help them learn the language of the classroom. That is our challenge as educators, and is not a small issue. I know it's not.

So one of the things that we've been talking about a lot in bidialectal children and teaching reading is translanguaging. We talked about code switching, and code switching is this idea that you have two codes. You need the second code in order to learn to read. And so we try to suppress the first one. Translanguaging says that children need access to their entire linguistic repertoire in order to learn to read. Just like that girl in South Africa, she needed access to her entire language system in order to do an oral language task. And we know that's true for reading. So the first thing you're going to do is not be so quick to try to eliminate the use of home language. In fact, it's more important for kids that you recognize that it's a home language and try to incorporate it into what you're doing. Don't correct examples of what kids are doing and make them feel like what they're doing is wrong.

That's what I saw in our college students. They had been corrected so much that they were afraid to talk, and that is not what we want to do. We don't want kids to be reticent to read out loud because they're afraid they're doing it wrong. We want to hear what they're doing. We want to hear if they're true mistakes or whether it's dialect and be able to respond to it. But if you make children afraid to read, they will not show you what they know. In an article that Mark Seidenberg and I wrote together, in American Educator, I used an example that's often used of a little boy who was in a classroom — second or third grade — reading aloud. And instead of "ask," he said "aks," which is really common in African American speakers. So "I aksed him to do something" instead of "I asked him to do something." The teacher stopped him in the middle of reading in front of the whole class and said, "You said that wrong.

Now you need to say it right." And she made him say it over and over again until she thought he had it right. Then she said, "Keep reading." So he kept reading and then he said "aks" again. And she stopped him again, and she did the same humiliating thing to him a second time. And then when she said, "Keep reading," can you guess what he said? "I don't want to read" ... because he's been humiliated about the way he uses language. And, frankly, if you have kids in your classroom who are using certain features of a dialect, I promise you that most of the kids are doing it because it's regional or it's cultural. And if it's something that you want him to learn ... he says "aks," but you also want him to know "ask," then that's something that you teach in a very different way than what this teacher was doing.

Do not correct children in front of the class, and don't treat it like a correction. Treat it like an extension: "Oh, you said 'ask' this way. You say 'aks.' There's another way to say this: 'ask.' Let's see what that looks like. Let's write it." Help them to create a mental representation of this thing that you're adding to their repertoire. You're not getting rid of what they're doing. You're adding something new to it, but you're allowing them to use what they know to learn this new pronunciation of "ask." Provide more opportunities and exposure to text in order for kids to learn how to read who are using different language varieties in their oral language. One of the things I see a lot in schools is teachers who are really proud of the reading block. So the reading block is, "I have a 90 minute reading block."

That's fantastic. You're teaching reading, but that's reading instruction. Kids need the opportunity to read. There needs to be more opportunity to read in the classroom and recognize when children may need to use their own language system to support what they're trying to learn. So like this little girl in South Africa, who had the presence of mind and trusted me enough to say, "I need to use my language" — you know your four year olds aren't going to do that. They aren't going to say, "I need to say it this way first, and then I'll do it that way." It's incumbent upon us as the adults in the environment to figure out that kids are using language in this way and they need to learn to read. We are not trying to suppress the way they talk. We are trying to teach them to read and write. And so translanguaging is purposeful.

It's not — these are not errors. These are not problems. They're not ungrammatical. It's a language system that children really know and that they can use to support what they need to know. And I know that there are some people who, out there, who think, "This is not the way to do things. There are consequences for using this language system." You are absolutely right about that. I am going to acknowledge that, that because it is a low prestige system, we think poorly about children who use it. And what I'm saying is that if we're going to teach children to read, we need to get past that, because we are not saying that for the rest of this child's life, they are always going to use African American English when they read and write. But I promise you that if they don't learn to read and write, they are not going to learn to extend their language system.

What we have seen in our research is that children who can read code switch, because they learn it from print. But if you can't read, then the chances that you will do it decrease. And so reading and oral language, dialect variation, oral language, translanguaging, reading are reciprocal. They support each other. And so teaching kids to read helps them with oral language. We talk all the time about how oral language supports print, but the reality is print also supports oral language. So when you learn to read, it improves your language outcomes as well. We're seeing that more and more in research, that there are certain kinds of linguistic structures that don't occur very much in oral language. And so if children are going to learn them, it's from reading a book. When you look at transcripts from adults, you don't see a lot of complex language like relative clauses that adults aren't walking around saying, "I want to talk to the boy who went over to the store to buy something."

But books do it all the time. And so kids were seeing like four times as many exemplars of this kind of complex syntax in a book than they were ever going to get in oral language. So reading supports language, not just language supports reading. And I think that's a really important reciprocality that we need to think about, and especially for children who are trying to learn to read coming from a different language community. What are the best strategies for use with children at the youngest ages? I'm not sure, but we have to work together to figure out how do we support children learning the language of the classroom when they come to school with a different variety, because what we're seeing in our research now, not only in my lab, but in other labs, is that African American kids at very young ages, preschool to second grade, are not doing so poorly on our standardized tests of reading. But when they get to third, fourth, and fifth grade and need to be able to use those skills to learn new things, to be able to become more complex language users, we're losing them.

Helping kids make this transition from this early word reading to being able to read text and gain meaning from it is our task right now. How do we support dialect speakers at tier one, at tier two, at tier three? And can we incorporate dialect into our teaching, into our clinical practice the same way we do other languages? If we can get past the idea that using language differently within English is not bad English, we might even be able to take some of what we have learned from bilingualism and apply it to these children that we need to be thinking about these students in very similar ways. These students who are really dense dialect users are having some of the same difficulty with reading that we see in our bilingual readers. And so we're at a crossroads right now as teachers, as speech language pathologists, and thinking about how we move children along in literacy so that they become good, strong readers for the rest of their lives.

Finally, and most importantly, no English is less valuable than any other English. The way that African American children "language" needs to be affirmed and respected. I love that — "language" as a verb. It's something that Ofelia García does. Language is not just a noun. Language is a verb. We not only learn the language, but we language. We language in different ways, and the way we language comes from who we are, where we came from, and who loved us. It's the language that we're loved in, and it's the one that we bring to school. And we have to learn how to integrate it into our teaching if we're ever going to make a difference in the reading struggles that we see in children who use different and strong varieties of English. I couldn't do this work without my friends, colleagues, the National Institutes of Health, and others who have supported this work. And it's important that we continue to think about how we can work together to take what we currently know about reading and adapt it so that it works for everybody.

Narrator:

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