Literacy in African American Communities by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-135-66473-2
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS

As we enter a new millennium and the perceived “reading crisis” continues, discussions of reading as a largely linguistic task driven by the strength of a child’s oral language skills, including vocabulary, sentence structure, and word knowledge, have increased (Chall et al., 1990; Snow, 1995; Snow et al., 1998). The time is right to reexamine the link between the African American child’s linguistic and reading skills. Research examining the achievement gap appears to be the subject of renewed interest (Delpit, 1995; Jencks & Phillips, 1998a; Singham, 1998). Many important questions have been left unanswered and should be revisited. Furthermore, it will be important that attempts to answer these research questions be informed by past studies, avoiding some of their methodological shortcomings.

The major questions that seem to warrant further exploration are as follows:

1. Do the morphosyntactic characteristics of AAE contribute to reading difficulties for African American children? If so, How? When? and Which ones?

The possible contribution of morphosyntactic features of AAE to the reading problem is an open question. AAE apparently affects all domains of language including semantics, pragmatics, and phonology, but those that affect word formation and grammatical relationships have been of special interest for understanding literacy because of their potential to impact reading outcomes. However, the extent to which these features are influential is still unclear. In addition, if these dialectal variations do impact reading it is equally unclear at what point in the reading process that dialect becomes important. For example, in our own research program we calculated the density of dialect2 used by 50 African American children at Time 1 (preschool or kindergarten) and Time 2 (fourth grade) and compared it to reading ability in third and fourth grades as measured by the MAT. The preliminary data suggest that the density of dialect used during preschool and kindergarten was a strong predictor of reading outcomes at third and fourth grades. These data suggest that examining dialect use in African American children during the emergent and pre-emergent stages of reading may be informative. Finally, we (Washington & Craig, 1994, 1998) found differential use of dialect features by young children such that some features (zero copula/auxiliary and subject–verb agreement) were used by most children regardless of income status, whereas others were used infrequently. It is possible that not all child AAE features have the potential to interfere with reading, but only a circumscribed set really matters. If future research can determine which features are most likely to impact reading outcomes, reading instruction and reading outcomes may be improved.

2. What additional factors contribute uniquely to low reading performance in African American children?

Unlike AAE, which uniquely characterizes African American children, many of the factors identified as potential barriers to reading development would influence reading outcomes in any child regardless of ethnic background. For example, poverty, home literacy environment, parental education, and teacher expectations for performance are important influences on achievement for all children. It is not clear how or why these variables impact the African American child in ways that are different from children of other races.

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