Variable Production of African American English Across Oracy and Literacy Contexts

Abstract

The findings are discussed in terms of dialect-shifting abilities of African American students and the role of writing as a special context to support their entry into dialect shifting.

Examining the Use of Spoken Dialect Indices With African American Children in the Southern United States

“…The length of samples or the size of the analysis set for children who completed the narrative retell may have played a role in findings related to the DDMs. Results from the current study and previous studies suggest that the DDMw will show a more robust range of values than the DDMu during the type of narrative task that was used in the current study or those procedures in which the sample length is set at a specific number (i.e., 50 c-units/ utterances, as in Craig & Washington, 2002;Thompson et al, 2004). In contrast, other investigations suggest that the DDMu will show a more robust range of values for analysis sets with greater amounts of talk or a larger number of utterances (e.g., Oetting & McDonald, 2002).…”

“…DDMs seem to capture differences in the quantity of NMAE related to age or grade Horton-Ikard & Ellis Weismer, 2005), sampling contexts (Horton-Ikard & Miller, 2004;Washington, Craig, & Kushmaul, 1998), and even NMAE varieties (Oetting & McDonald, 2002). They also have been used with children from diverse economic backgrounds (Horton-Ikard & Miller, 2004;Washington & Craig, 1994) and across oral and literate contexts (Horton-Ikard & Pittman, 2010;Ivy & Masterson, 2012;Kohler et al, 2007;Thompson et al, 2004).…”

“…As Green (2011) noted, quantitative features-based approaches, although limited in their ability to describe qualitative aspects of NMAE, have been useful for diagnostic purposes of verifying participant use of certain NMAE forms that may, because of differences in morphosyntax, overidentify children as having a language impairment (e.g., Oetting et al, 2009;Seymour, Bland-Stewart, & Green, 1998;Stockman, Guillory, Siebert, & Bolt, 2013), and for examining typical and atypical language behaviors in different subgroups of NMAE speakers (e.g., Apel & Thomas-Tate, 2009;Horton-Ikard, 2010;Oetting & Garrity, 2006). In addition, each of the above measures have been used fairly recently for empirical investigations concerned with the following three areas: (a) quantifying spoken production of NMAE, (b) determining whether style shifting (movement from NMAE to Mainstream American English [MAE]) is occurring in the spoken language production of children as they grow older or perform different tasks, and (c) understanding the relationship between spoken NMAE and literacy outcomes (e.g., Champion, Rosa-Lugo, Rivers, & McCabe, 2010;Terry, Connor, Petscher, & Conlin, 2012;Thompson, Craig, & Washington, 2004). Thus, it becomes important to determine whether each of the dialect indices consistently detects quantitative differences in the production of NMAE for children in different grades or at different ages.…”

The Index of Narrative Microstructure: A Clinical Tool for Analyzing School-Age Children’s Narrative Performances

“…There is a rapidly accumulating body of research suggesting that narrative assessment is a valid, sensitive, and potentially less biased language analysis tool relative to norm-referenced standardized language assessments (e.g., see Craig & Washington, 2000;Muñoz et al, 2003;Thompson, Craig, & Washington, 2004;Washington, Craig, & Kushmaul, 1998). Two more common approaches to interpretation of narrative outcome data are norm referencing and criterion referencing (Johnson, 1995).…”

The Development of Sociolinguistic Diglossic Knowledge in Oral-Literacy Mismatch Situations: Preliminary Findings from Palestinian Arabs

“…Moreover, studies of language and literacy development in mismatch situation show that enhanced diglossic knowledge and awareness (referred to as "linguistic flexibility" or "linguistic awareness") correlates with increased ability to switch between the two language varieties and/or with successfully learning to read and write in the high language variety (e.g., Terry, Connor, Thomas-Tate, & Love, 2010;Terry & Scarborough, 2011;Pittas & Nunes, 2014) and that third grade typically developing African American children speakers of AAE were found to be able to switch between the two language varieties depending on the context (i.e. reading and writing versus oral communication) (Craig, Thompson, Washington & Potter, 2003;Thompson, Craig, & Washington, 2004). Consequently, it has been found that the most effective approaches toward academic success of AAE speaking children are not only those that cherish diversity and hold a high level of expectation from all students, but that first and foremost are linguistically informed in their design.…”