What do teacher educators know about English spelling?

African American Language in Children’s Literature

“…Further, if teachers are not knowledgeable about the linguistic features of WME, the language of instruction in U.S. schools, we firmly believe that they also are not aware of the linguistic features of AAL, mainly because instructors in educator preparation programs do not provide content on AAL (Pittman et al, 2022). Educators as teachers (see Pittman et al, 2023), as teacher educators teaching the teachers (see Pittman et al, 2022), and as school administrators (see Razfar et al, 2023) must understand the differences between the linguistic features of AAL and WME. Without this knowledge, for example, the literacy assessment scores of AAL speakers can be inaccurate because the directions of most literacy assessments state that points should not be deducted for language variation.…”

“…of WME. Unfortunately, decades of research have shown that many teachers do not possess this knowledge (Bos et al, 2001; Binks-Cantrell et al, 2012; Cunningham et al, 2004; Moats & Lyon, 1996; Pittman et al, 2020; Pittman et al, 2023; Spear-Swerling & Brucker, 2003).…”