Dialects in the Classroom

We begin in Module 1 and Module 2 with a quick review of dialects and their formation. In Module 3 we turn to the history of writing and the importance of standardization, stressing that speaking a nonstandard dialect is not an impediment to orthographic mapping. In Module 4 we provide a brief history of New Orleans English and we give some examples of the features a teacher may find in the classroom, divided by those that may affect decoding and encoding words (i.e. phonetic and phonological variation) and those that may affect the comprehension encoding of sentences (syntactic and semantic variation). In Module 5 we discuss some issues of particular importance in New Orleans, where charter schools may result in a wide range of dialectal variation in a single early elementary school classroom.  

We wish to stress that while we are outlining some potential educational pitfalls related to dialect, and while some research suggests that reading may be more difficult for speakers of some dialects (Washington et al. 2013), we do not want to overstate the difficulty students may encounter in learning to read. Research (e.g. Chall et al. 1990) confirms that students who speak nonstandard dialects often have a good deal of receptive experience with standard English – consider Barnitz students, who understood very well what that -s represented and had no trouble understanding it – and when given the same instruction achieve comparable levels of competence in grades 1, 2, and 3 (Chall et al. 1990). Nor do we wish to suggest that all cases in which students pronounce words in ways teachers may not expect or who misinterpret a text should be dismissed as dialectal variation; it is best to send students who struggle for further evaluation. Our goal is to answer frequently encountered questions to facilitate teachers’ jobs, and to serve as a supplement to instructional materials that describe sound-grapheme correspondences but cannot account for all the variation present in the country. In short, we aim to answer the question, “Why do my students pronounce/write [x] like this?” While this guide is targeted at K-3 instructors, the material – especially that targeting semantic and syntactic variation – may prove to be of use to teachers working with students at higher levels, who have passed through the phonics-heavy phase, as well.