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

2017, Learning and Instruction

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.