Dialects in the Classroom

One speaker’s dialect may differ from someone else’s in word choice (lexicon), word meaning (semantics), sentence construction (syntax), sounds and pronunciation (phonetics and phonology), and word formation/conjugations (morphology). In linguistics, we refer to differences in specific features as variants. In this document, we hope to help you identify common forms of variation you may encounter in your students native dialects, and to celebrate that while also providing key adaptations to literacy materials to acknowledge the varied linguistic backgrounds your students bring to the classroom. We’ll be presenting variables at all levels, beginning with those that affect the encoding and decoding of individual words (phonetic and phonological variables) and then moving to those that affect sentence construction and comprehension (morphological, syntactic, and semantic variables).