African American Vernacular English Paper

Nearly every American speaks some dialect of English that varies from Standard American English (SAE); however, although dialects are entirely acceptable variants of English, some dialectal speakers experience increased difficultly, such as negative stigmas and intelligibility issue, due to their speech patterns. This is often the case for speakers of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), which is spoken by most but not all African Americans. AAVE differs from SAE in the syntax, phonology, semantics, and pragmatics (Pearson, Conner, & Jackson, 2012). Moreover, due to the differences in the language systems, children speaking AAVE often experience difficulty when entering school. Specifically, African American children often struggle when learning to read and spell and have decreased phonological skills when compared to their SAE speaking counterparts. Due to the dialectal differences, some children are misdiagnosed with a learning or language disability when one is not present.
Discussion
A. Topics
1. Effects on Reading
a. 0333Children who use AAVE produced AAVE when reading texts written in SAE
The research team aimed to evaluate the early literacy skills in 63 African American preschool students; the participants were drawn from two Head Start preschools in the same suburban and urban area. The research team evaluated the children’s dialectal use and their linguistic performance during an oral narrative. The participants were evaluated on their vocabulary skill to determine the effect of vocabulary in the early linguistic development. The research team found that children who used AAVE more frequently and less frequently outperformed the children who used AAVE with moderate frequency. The research team concluded that the early linguistic skills of children, such as phonological awareness, contributed heavily to literacy development. Moreover, the researchers concluded that children as early as preschool age learn to code shift between AAVE and