Dialects in the Classroom

Although everyone has a dialect, some students’ Playground English features are accommodated better than others at school. Likewise, some dialectal features may affect encoding and decoding more than others, or may affect encoding more than they do decoding. For example, a student may have less difficulty reading words with a post-vocalic /r/ than they do in writing them. Recognizing a

word is easier than remembering where to put an R for an /r/ you don’t normally pronounce. As a

result students may leave out R when writing a word like car, or they may insert one where it doesn’t belong (classically, idear for idea). Having said this, it bears remembering here that the British deal with this all the time, as it’s part of their standard dialect. Many American teachers may not be

accustomed to r-less pronunciations and materials don’t often present it, but it’s not something unknown in the world or impossible to accommodate in teaching literacy.

In this section we will identify specific features you may encounter in your New Orleans classroom. We’ll begin with those that can affect the decoding and encoding of words, and move on to those that can affect sentence comprehension and composition (i.e. the decoding and encoding of multi-word utterances). The features we present here are the most important ones we’ve encountered in our research, but you may well encounter something we haven’t addressed. We’d love to hear from you if you do!