African American English Language Analysis

Parents want their children to be literate and proficient readers. A child’s teacher is expected to be knowledgeable and supportive when engaging their students and enforcing reading skills. When elementary aged children are first learning to read, they are specifically taught and focused on areas of development such as phonemic awareness, vocabulary, comprehension, and fluency. When comparing the literacy abilities of African American (AA) children to that of their peers, there seems to be a significant variance and a general lack of understanding in several of these skills. With the possibility of an African American English (AAE) dialect influencing reading comprehension, there needs to be a strategy to increase literacy in these students.
“Thus, if a teacher believes that addressing a student’s linguistic needs in schools can positively enhance achievement (survey findings indicated 70.7% teachers believed so), and that s/he has the ability to teach the student successfully, the teacher feels self-efficacy. These differences should not be treated as reflecting deficiencies in ability. Instead, schools must provide children the support they need to master the language required for academic development and equip them with the language required for success in society after completion of school.” (Gupta, 2010, p.163). Because literacy skills are used in all subjects taught in English, the development of these skills will help children in their future endeavors. Judgement of a child’s ability should not reflect a teacher’s misunderstanding of variation in dialect. According to Snow, Burns, and Griffin (1999) a teacher who is confident, sensitive, and knowledgeable about the AAE dialect, will be more able to prepare resources and lesson plans that are consistent with the phonology, syntax, and terms within the child’s spoken language. With the use of learning strategies that are more focused on the skills of the teacher and not just the student, there is an opportunity to develop the reading and literacy achievements of children with dialect
Carefully selected e-books, chosen by the teacher to specifically develop reading difficulties, provided additional scenarios in which literacy skills were fostered. Because the child was engaged in the book experience, verbal communication and vocabulary comprehension could be encouraged and developed. Particularly, Verhallen, Bus, and de Jong (2006) evaluated reading relations in 5-year-old children that read traditional and e-book stories and discovered an increase in the comprehension and vocabulary of the children enlisting the electronic devices. (p. 410). Their findings provided that if a child with an AAE dialect was afforded even just one opportunity to read with an e-book, it was more effective than having an adult read a traditional book. This implies that children, especially those in a lower socioeconomic status, could greatly benefit from these advancements. In the findings of Larson and Marsh (2005), “children become competent in using digital technologies from a very young age and the lack of attention by educators to the experience creates dissonance between home and school experiences.” (p. 70). With the use of electronics, embarrassment of a child’s reading skills can be diminished, and the student is provided a safe reading and learning environment. The reader does not need to