Articulation and Students who Speak African… | Reading Universe

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Skill Explainer

Articulation Skill Explainer

Nicole Ormandy, M.Ed., Logan McWilliams, M.Ed.

What do I need to know about teaching articulation to students who speak AAE?

African American English (AAE) is a rule-governed, systematic variety of English with its own phonological, morphological, and syntactic patterns. This variety of English carries identity, history, and sophisticated communicative practices. Students who speak AAE are not speaking "incorrectly," and dialect differences are not articulation errors or speech deficits.

The word "pricking" as an illustration of the '-ing' suffix. — Photo by Tanya Martineau

In order to determine whether one of your students who speaks AAE needs additional articulation support, you'll need to first understand the common phonological language variations of AAE:

Consonant cluster reduction, when students drop a sound in a final blend — "tes" for "test"
Dropping 'g' in the suffix -ing — "ridin" for "riding"

Substituting /th/ with /f/, /t/, or /v/ in the middle or final position immediately following a vowel — "wit" for "with"
Substituting initial /th/ with /d/ immediately before a vowel — "dem" for "them"
Transposing the /sk/ blend as /ks/ — "ekscape" for "escape"

When students apply these variations to spoken, conversational speech, teachers should avoid correcting them or implying that AAE is "wrong." Instead, your literacy instruction should focus on helping students connect spoken language by expanding upon their strengths.

There are teachers who, with all good intentions, encourage students to abandon their dialect in order to read and talk in alignment with General American English (GAE) – but GAE is not a neutral or universal standard; it's one of many varieties of the English language. Therefore, any instruction that focuses on contrasting, correcting, or diminishing AAE (intentionally or not) invalidates students' identities and linguistic strengths. Reading Universe advisor Dr. Julie Washington illustrates this with an example

Video thumbnail for Dialects in the Classroom — Produced by Reading Universe, a partnership of WETA, Barksdale Reading Institute, and First Book

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We can teach children to read without getting rid of African American English, Appalachian English, Southern English, and instead incorporating it so that challenges 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 it 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 "axe," which is really common in African American speakers. So I "axed" 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 "axe" 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 "axe," 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 'axe.' 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."

Screenshot of Julie Washington and a graphic of the U.S.

Learn More About African American English
If this approach to AAE is new to you or conflicts with your understanding of language use in the classroom, we encourage you to listen to Dr. Julie Washington's timely talk, Teaching Reading to Children Who Speak African American English. She explains dialect and the importance of classroom practices that affirm students' identities while they expand their communicative and literacy repertoires across contexts.

Teaching Tips: How can I help my students?

In addition to the strategies in this skill explainer, the following adjustments to your classroom instruction can help affirm, extend, and build upon the existing linguistic and literacy strengths of students who speak African American English .

Pay close attention to students' speech. It's common for speakers of AAE (and many regional dialects) to produce a number of sounds differently than speakers of GAE (bave instead of bathe, for example). By listening closely in everyday conversation, you will begin to notice phonological patterns used in dialects while also monitoring how students connect spoken language patterns to print.

Thoughtfully plan practice opportunities to monitor articulation. Engaging students in phoneme isolation tasks (especially using words with ending blends, like past, hand, or left) and letter-sound drills allows you to monitor that students are able to articulate all sounds. This is a great opportunity to practice with phonemes that aren't always used in their dialect (especially /th/, and letters common among ending blends).

Task

Example

Phoneme isolation tasks focused on the final position

You might ask:

What's the last sound in desk? Lump? Cold? Birth?

Students respond:

/sk/, /p/, /d/, /th/

Warm-up with flashcards where students see a letter and state the corresponding sound

Teacher shows the letter 't', and students state the corresponding sound: 't'.

Auditory activity where students listen to a sound and state the corresponding letter

Teacher says /g/ and asks, "What spells /g/?" Student responds: 'g'.

Connect with meaning. Some students who speak AAE may not distinguish the difference in sound articulation. To support, you can draw attention to both sound and meaning. Imagine a phoneme segmentation task like this one:

Teacher says:

Tell me the sounds in with.

Student responds:

/w/, /i/, /f/

Teacher might respond:

You're saying this word like it sounds to you. People pronounce this word in different ways across English varieties; some say 'wif' some say 'with,' and when it's written in print, you'll usually see -th in books and school texts.

Student replies:

I don't hear the difference.

In addition to describing the mouth placement to produce the sound /th/ (top teeth bite down on tongue), you can also show why it matters by connecting to meaning — "whiff can mean to smell, to get a whiff of that scent." This quick step can help draw attention to the difference in meaning between with and whiff.

Support spelling connections without invalidating dialect. Students often draw on the sound patterns they use in spoken language when representing words in print, and this is a developmentally appropriate part of learning to spell. For some students, dialect or accent may influence how certain sounds are represented in writing. For example, a student may spell cold as col because that reflects how the word is pronounced in their community. In these moments, acknowledge that the student's pronunciation is valid while also explicitly teaching the conventional spelling used in print: c-o-l-d. The instructional goal is not to change the way students speak, but to help them connect the sounds and language patterns they already use to the spellings readers expect to see in written text.

What You'll See As They're Learning — And How to Respond

Below are examples of how students who speak African American English may respond in both speech and writing. Analyzing students' use of language to determine whether they're a true articulation deficit versus a rule-based, phonological variation is important, because it will impact the way you respond through instruction or prompting.

What You See
(oral or written response, assessment)

What This Could Mean

What You Could Do (teacher instruction/action)

In an oral reading fluency assessment, a student reads, "Kate asked her bruvver to go outside."

Your student may have difficulty distinguishing between sounds (/v/ and /th/) or they are applying an AAE variation where 'th' is replaced by /v/ after a vowel.

If this occurs in a formal assessment, check out your assessment protocol to determine whether language variations are marked as "errors." Many assessment protocols are increasingly sensitive to dialectal differences. In any case, the purpose of assessment is to inform instruction, so a diagnostic teacher will do further analysis to determine if any support is needed.

To build this understanding, look for patterns in the student's speech as well as classroom wide. If other students pronounce the sound in the same way, it's evidence of a phonological variation among those dialect users.

As long as the students correctly represent the sound in their spelling, there is no need for further intervention.

In a phoneme segmentation task, your student substitutes a sound in the target word:

You say,

Tell me the sounds in they.

The student responds,

/d/, /ā/.

Your student may have difficulty distinguishing between sounds or they're applying the AAE pattern to substitute /d/ for /th/ in pronouns that refer to a group of people.

Use a different word with /th/ in your phoneme segmentation task like thick or thin. If the student articulates the initial /th/ sound, there is no need for articulation instruction. If the student does not produce the /th/ sound when segmenting those words, teach students how to produce the sound. (Watch as Katina Johnson teaches articulation of the /th/ sound).

A student writes, "The dog will ekscape if we don't shut the door."

AAE speakers pronounce /sk/ in some GAE words as /ks/.

These differences don't necessarily represent an overall problem with articulation.

Acknowledge that your student spelled the word escape just like it sounds when they say it, let them know they might hear this word pronounced differently in different communities or contexts, and here's how it usually appears in print: 'e-s-c-a-p-e'.

To help them remember that spelling, prompt your student to divide the word into syllables and focus on spelling one syllable at a time, repeating after you: "es-cape."

If this took place in a spoken conversation only, you do not correct the variation, but you monitor to ensure the phonological variation isn't being misapplied to print.

Supportive Print-Feedback Practices: Helping Your Students Build Upon Their Dialectal Strengths

Because AAE has phonological rules that differ from GAE, some students who speak AAE will likely apply these variations to their spoken language in the classroom. As a teacher, your job is not to prevent students from using their dialect but instead to help build upon that linguistic system to help them unlock the GAE code for decoding and spelling.

For example, if a student says, "Come wit me," there is no need to interrupt or correct their dialectal variation. You may choose to model GAE in a very natural way, like "Sure, I'll come with you," but nothing beyond that.

But now let's imagine a student wrote a sentence during dictation that looks like this:

Sam gets in the baftub.

You may say, "Read your sentence back to me," and the student reads bathtub as baftub.

You'll say:

Oh you spelled bathtub just like it sounds to you. There's another way to say that word; you say "baftub" but it's also said "bath-tub, bathtub." And when we're representing that last sound in bath, it's spelled with a digraph. Do you know which letters spell the digraph /th/ in bath? That's right! 't-h' spells the sound /th/.

An image of a feather and the word "feather," with the 'th' underlined.

This type of feedback affirms that their oral language usage is correct, and we're extending that understanding to support printed language. Continuing to incorporate lots of practice spelling words with /th/ in the middle or ending position after a vowel by having students repeat words after you, and ensuring they represent the sound accurately in print.

Feedback and instruction should become more explicit when:

the student the draws on familiar phonological patterns when representing words in print (like in the example above)
the student cannot distinguish between sounds (they don't hear the difference between /f/ and /th/)
speech patterns are not characteristic of AAE (they're true articulation issues, like saying /w/ instead of /r/ — wun/run)

Common Misunderstandings or Myths About Articulation and AAE

Myth: Students who apply the phonological rules of AAE are likely to have articulation problems.

Reality: Many speech patterns associated with AAE are typical dialect features, not speech sound disorders. Dialect differences and speech disorders are not the same, but it is possible for these two to coexist. Therefore, consult with an SLP if your student has a wide range of articulation difficulties.

Myth: Teachers should correct students' pronunciation errors when speaking or during phonological awareness tasks.

Reality: If the "error" is actually a rule-based application of the AAE dialect, you should not correct their oral language. You can extend their understanding by restating what they said with the GAE pronunciation or pointing out that they might hear this word pronounced differently in different communities or contexts, and here's how it usually appears in print. However, if you see the student is drawing on familiar phonological patterns when representing words in print , be sure they can articulate the sound and pair it with the corresponding grapheme.

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