Dialects in the Classroom

The purpose of this guide is to highlight the importance of dialect awareness in the instruction of reading and to provide teachers in New Orleans with a primer on features they may encounter in the classroom that may affect their instruction. Reading, per the Simple View of reading, is the product of decoding and comprehension.1  Just as any number times zero is still zero, without decoding comprehension is lost, and without comprehension, all the decoding in the world won’t get you anywhere. If I know the Greek alphabet, I might be able to decode words on signs in Athens, Greece – but since I don’t speak Greek, I won’t comprehend the meaning of what I’m reading. For example, I may see a sign that says ‘νερό’ and recognize each letter and how to pronounce it. But if I do not know that νερό means ‘water,’ that decoding process is useless. Likewise, it is possible to speak a language, but if one cannot make sense of the marks on the page, they are entirely useless.

Consideration of dialect is important to both decoding and comprehension. One hundred years of research into literacy instruction provides us with strong evidence that despite the sometimes opaque orthography that English uses and the automaticity with which good readers recognize written words, phonics-based early instruction is key to reading success. Volumes of research from multiple fields, including psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience – including data on eye tracking2  – have shown the mechanisms by which our brains process the written word, and evidence from educational studies3  supports an early focus on phonics as indispensable to early literacy instruction. When we encounter written text, we mobilize parts of the brain intended for other functions, building associations between written symbols and the sounds they represent, associating first sounds and then specific spellings with the lexical entries in our heads (you can think of the lexical entry as the dictionary storage in your brain). 4 Because dialects may differ between individuals in terms of the pronunciations of these lexical entries, the path between decoding the words and retrieving the lexical entry may look different for speakers of different dialects, but the process is the same regardless of dialect. For example, for speakers of some English dialects, which and witch begin with different sounds: the WH is a digraph representing a voiceless labial-velar fricative (essentially, /hw/). For most speakers of modern American dialects, however, WH is just another way of transcribing the /w/ sound.