Affirming African American English: Culturally Responsive Assessment & Instruction

Written by Dr. Megan Gierka and Nicole Ormandy

Wherever there is language, there is dialect.

Dialect¹ is “a version of a language spoken by a group of people distinguished by characteristics such as race, ethnicity, religion, and/or geographic region" (Washington & Seidenberg, 2021). Therefore, every student has a dialect.

By far, the most well-documented language variation, or dialect, is African-American English (Washington & Seidenberg, 2021). African-American English is a systematic, rule-governed cultural dialect with specific features across three language domains – phonology, morphology, and syntax.

Assessment is a necessary part of daily classroom practice because it helps educators to better understand the needs of their students. When administering reading probes, we often use accuracy as a strong metric to guide further diagnostics and skill groupings. However, students who speak African American English (AAE) require careful analysis to yield accurate conclusions. Consider this example:

A culturally and linguistically responsive teacher recognizes that AAE has its own grammatical rules and syntax that differ from General American English (GAE) (the language of the text). Despite the prevalence of AAE, few educators have been taught to recognize the rule-based features of dialects, such as the syntactic features of subject expression* and subject-verb agreement (usually of was/were)** in the above example. Without this awareness, teachers may not be able to target sources of true academic difficulty versus dialectal differences. Therefore, when analyzing this Oral Reading Fluency assessment data, teachers have to be mindful that the learner reads the way they speak, so marking dialectal variations as ‘errors’ may make it seem like the student is not an accurate reader.

Let’s look at another example. This time from a phoneme segmentation fluency task:

A knowledgeable educator who leverages AAE through a strengths-based approach recognizes that in AAE, the unvoiced /th/ sound is represented /f/ following a vowel. It’s not troublesome that the learner responds to this oral language task in their dialect. Dr. Julie Washington explains that learners should use their dialect in oral language since it is a valid system for oral communication. However, if the teacher later sees the student spell ‘with’ as ‘wif’, then it indicates that they should provide instruction in the grapheme used in written English. Remember, the job of teachers is not to change or correct oral language, rather to make the written language differences known to students to strengthen their academic writing.

When educators respect and build upon the language students are loved in, they create classrooms that value diversity and foster meaningful growth. Let us remember that all students are experts in language. Our collective goal must be to respect and celebrate their linguistic and cultural heritage while providing them with additional proficiency in classroom English to support their interactions with print and the broader world. Through these practices, we honor the past, enrich the present, and empower the future.

References
Washington, J. A., & Seidenberg, M. S. (2021). Teaching reading to African American children: When home and school language differ. American Educator, 45(2), 10–13. https://www.aft.org/ae/summer2021/washington_seidenberg

¹ This blog uses the term ‘dialect’ to define the shared rules and features derived from specific regions, cultures, social cohorts, or racial/ethnic groups of the speaker. Dialect can also be referred to as ‘language variation.’