Does children's dialect awareness support later reading and spelling in the standard language form? (original) (raw)

Abstract

Dialect users have considerable difficulty with learning literacy in the standard form of the language for a variety of reasons. One aspect of their difficulty relates to phonological differences between the standard and the vernacular form: for example, Arabic dialect users' performance in phonological awareness tasks is lower when the phonemes exist in the standard but do not exist in the vernacular form (Saiegh-Haddad, Levin, Hende, & Ziv, 2011). Sentence comprehension is also affected by dialect use, presumably with consequences for reading comprehension: by the age of five users of Standard American English (SAE) can rely on the final "s" for third person present to determine whether an event is generic or past whereas African American Dialect (AAD) users cannot do so by the age of seven (De Villiers & Johnson, 2007). Education policies to address this linguistic issue have resulted in heated debates (see, for example, Rickford, 1999). Divergent approaches have included, at one extreme, the proposition that dialect users should be allowed to write as they speak, whereas at the other extreme there were suggestions of teaching children to speak, for example "good French", so that they could write correctly. Less radical approaches have involved the systematic exposure of preschool children to story book reading (Feitelson, Goldstein, Iraqi, & Share, 1993), because vernacular forms are not written and story books are written in the standard form.

Figures (5)

Loading...

Loading Preview

Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.

References (37)

  1. Aidinis, A., & Nunes, T. (2001). The role of different levels of phonological awareness in the development of reading and spelling in Greek. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 14, 145-177.
  2. Baratz, J. (1969). A bi-dialectal task for determining language proficiency in economically disadvantaged Negro children. Child Development, 40 (3), 889-901.
  3. Berko, J. (1958). The child's learning of English morphology. Word, 14, 150-177.
  4. Bradley, L., & Bryant, P. (1983). Categorizing sounds and learning to read-a causal connection. Nature, 301, ( 3), pp. 419-421.
  5. Bryant, P., Deacon, H., & Nunes, T. (2006). Morphology and Spelling: What Have morphemes to do with Spelling? In R. Malatesha-Joshi and P. Aaron (eds.), Handbook of orthography and literacy. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp.601-616.
  6. Chliounaki, K., & Bryant, P. (2002). Construction and learning to spell. Cognitive Development, 17, 1489-1499.
  7. Cossu, G., Shankweiler, D., Liberman, I. K., Katz, L., & Tola, G. (1988). Awareness of phonological segments and reading ability in Italian children. Applied Psycholinguistics, 9, 1-16.
  8. Craig, H. K., Thompson, C. A., Washington, J. A., & Potter, S. L. (2004). Performance of Elementary-Grade African American Students on the Cray Oral Reading Tests.
  9. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 35, pp. 141-154.
  10. Defior, S., Alegría, J., Titos, R., & Martos, F. (2008). Using morphology when spelling in a shallow orthographic system: The case of Spanish. Cognitive Development, 23(1), 204-215.
  11. De Villiers, J. G., & Johnson, V. E. (2007). The information in thirdperson /s/: acquisition across dialects of American English. Journal of Child Language, 34, 133-158. doi: 10.1017/S0305000906007768
  12. Desberg, P., Elliot, D., & Marsh, G. (1980). American Black English and Spelling. In U. Frith (ed.), Cognitive Processes in Spelling. London: Academic Press, pp.69-80.
  13. Ehri, L., Nunes, S., Willows, D., Schuster, B., Yaghoub-Zadeh, Z., & Shanahan, T. (2001). Phonemic Awareness Instruction Helps Children Learn to Read: Evidence From the National Reading Panel's Meta-Analysis. Reading Research Quarterly, 36, ( 3), pp. 250- 287.
  14. Feitelson, D., Goldstein, Z., Iraqi, J., & Share, D. L. (1993). Effects of Listening to Story Reading on Aspects of Literacy Acquisition in a Diglossic Situation. Reading Research Quarterly, 28(1), 70-79.
  15. Ferguson, C (1991). Diglossia Revisited. Southest Journal of Linguistics, 10, ( 1), pp. 214- 234.
  16. Fogel, H., & Ehri, L. (2000). Teaching elementary students who speak Black English Vernacular to write in Standard English: Effects of dialect transformation practice. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 25, 212-235.
  17. Georgas, D., Paraskevopoulos, I.N., Mpezevegkis, H., & Giannitsas, N. (1997). Greek WISC - III. Athens: Ellinika Grammata.
  18. Goodman, K. S., & Buck, C. (1973). Dialect Barriers to Reading Comprehension revisited. Reading Teacher, 27(1), 6-12.
  19. Kemp, N. (2009.) The Spelling of Vowels Is Influenced by Australian and British English Dialect Differences. Scientific Studies of Reading, 12, ( 1), pp. 53-72.
  20. Labov, W. (1995). Can reading failure be reversed? A linguistic approach to the question. In V. Gadsden & D. Wagner (Eds.), Literacy among African-American youth: Issues in learning, teaching and schooling (pp. 39-68). Cresskill, UK: Hampton Press.
  21. Labov, W. (2001). Applying our knowledge of African American English to the problem of raising reading levels in inner-city schools. In S. Lanehart (ed.) Sociocultural and Historical Contexts of African American English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, pp. 299-318.
  22. Mahony, D., Singson, M., & Mann, V. (2000). Reading ability and sensitivity to morphological relations. Reading and Writing, 12, pp. 191-218.
  23. Mouzaki, A., Protopapas, A., Sideridis, G., & Simos, P. (2007). Examining the psychometric characteristics of a spelling test for students at the second, third, fourth and fifth grade of primary school. Epistimes tis Agogis, 1, 129-146.
  24. Newton, B. (1972). Cypriot Greek. The Hague, The Netherlands: Mouton.
  25. Nunes, T, & Bryant, P. (2006). Improving Literacy by Teaching Morphemes. London: Routledge.
  26. Nunes, T., Bryant, P., & Barros, R. (2012). The development of word recognition and its significance for comprehension and fluency. Journal of Educational Psychology, 104, 959- 973.
  27. Nunes, T., Bryant, P., & Bindman (1997). Morphological Spelling Strategies. Developmental Stages and Processes. Developmental Psychology, 33, 637-649.
  28. Olofsson, A., & Lundberg, I. (1985). Evaluation of long term effects of phonemic awareness training in kindergarten: Illustrations of some methodological problems in evaluation research. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 26, 21-34.
  29. Pacton, S., & Fayol, M., (2004). Learning to spell in a deep orthography. The case of French. In R. Berman (ed.), Language Development across Childhood and Adolescence. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 163-176.
  30. Pandey, A. (2000). TOEFL to the test: Are monodialectal AAL-speakers similar to ESL students? World Englishes, 19, 89-106.
  31. Perfetti, C. (2003). The universal grammar of reading. Scientific Studies of Reading, 7(1), 3- 24.
  32. Pittas, E., & Nunes, T. (2014). The relation between morphological awareness and reading and spelling in Greek: A longitudinal study. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, DOI 10.1007/s11145-014-9503-6.
  33. Rickford, J. R. (1999). The Ebonics controversy in my backyard: a sociolinguist's experiences and reflections. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 3(2), 267-266.
  34. Saiegh-Haddad, E., Levin, I., Hende, N., & Ziv, M. (2011). The Linguistic Affiliation Constraint and phoneme recognition in diglossic Arabic. Journal of Child Language 38 297-315.
  35. Tafa, E. (1995). Test Anixnefsis tis anaγnostikis ikanotitas (Test for diagnosing reading ability). Athens: Ellinika Grammata.
  36. Terry, N. P. (2006). Relations between dialect variation, grammar, and early spelling skills. Reading and Writing, 19, 907-931.
  37. Terry, N. P. (2010). Examining relationships among dialect variation and emergent literacy skills. Communication Disorders Quarterly. Online First, published on June 15, 2010. Doi:10.1177/1525740110368846.