Dialects in the Classroom

The first step toward phonemic awareness is phonological awareness: the ability to recognize and identify words that rhyme, identifying alliteration, words in a sentence, syllables, onset-rimes, initial, medial, final sounds in words, and manipulating sounds in words to create new words. 

Reading ability begins with the ability to process the phonological features of words. There is ample evidence that phonological awareness training is beneficial for beginning readers starting as early as age 4.1  In a review of phonological research, Smith et al.2  concluded that phonological awareness can be developed before reading and that it facilitates the subsequent acquisition of reading skills. The most common cause of reading difficulty in children is their inability to process the phonological features of words. Research has shown that weaknesses in the phonological awareness areas can be measured by a variety of reading tasks such as a phonemic awareness assessment. 

Phonemic Awareness is the highest form of Phonological Awareness and we want our students to master it. Phonemic Awareness is the ability to identify, think about or manipulate individual speech sounds in words. Students with basic phonemic awareness can identify the sounds in the word cat as /k/-/a/-/t/; those with advanced phonemic awareness can take a word like splat and produce spat when asked to remove the /l/ sound.  Students with a good understanding of phonological awareness have the underlying framework in place to become good readers (decoders) and writers (encoders). This understanding begins when students receive explicit instruction in phonological awareness. When good readers attempt to read and write an unfamiliar word, they do the following:  look for familiar patterns in the word segment the sounds in the word match the sounds with the known letters. Students with a poor understanding of phonological awareness have problems trying to figure out how sounds in words work in print. These students have not received proper instruction in the phonological awareness area and/or have experienced difficulty in learning HOW to identify the sounds in printed words. PA instruction is a critical component of effective reading instruction, but it is only one component. 

Let’s look at some PA activities starting at the syllable level and moving up to the phoneme level.  

Activity- Syllable level Activity

Compare the sounds in the New Orleans words (Playground English) to the sounds of words used in the classroom at the syllable level. Words such as pen-cil, bath-room, etc. Use FCRR Kindergarten-1st grade activity PA. 019. Syllable Graph

Activity- Contrast Analysis of New Orleans words and Classroom words.

Activity- Onset- Rime

In order for students to become good readers of a language that uses an alphabetic writing system, as English does, they must become aware of the fact that words are made up of individual sounds, or phonemes, that can be recombined to create different words.  Phonemic Awareness can be measured using the following tasks:

• Categorization- Which of the following words has a different first sound: bed, bus, chair, ball? (Chair)

• Identity- Which of the following word(s) begins with the same first sound as bat: ball, cat, bake? (Ball, Bake)

• Isolation- Tell me the sound you hear at the beginning of the word go? (/g/)

• Blending– what word do these sounds make: /k/-/a/–/t/? (cat)

• Segmentation- how many sounds (phonemes) do you hear in the word back? (Three: /b/-/æ/-/k/)

• Substitution- say the word man. Now change the /m/ to a /p/.  What is the word? (pan)

• Addition- Students make a new word by adding a phoneme to an existing   

• Word: what word do you have when you add /s/ to take? (stake)

• Deletion- say the word spot without the /s/ (pot)

Activity- Practice the activities listed above using the New Orleans words.  Paying close attention to the beginning and ending sounds of New Orleans words. For example, words such as fork, desk, test, and car. Practice segmenting the words at the phoneme level, emphasizing the ending or the beginning sounds of each word. /f/-/o/-/r/-/k/; /d/-/e/-/s/-/k/; /t/-/e/-/s/-/t/. 

Use FCRR activities:

K-1st grade Phoneme Matching:      PA.026 Sound Snacker-Sound Smacker 

K-1st grade Phoneme Segmenting:  PA. 044 The Sound Game 

List A: Examples of words that can drop /r/ following a vowel

car

father

card

bigger

cardboard

beer

court

Use the phoneme-grapheme mapping activity to practice and include the /r/. (Phonemic awareness lesson)

New Orleans Dialect-Phonics and Pronunciation

Effective Phonics instruction teaches children there is a predictable relationship between phonemes (speech sounds) and graphemes (the letters that represent the sounds in written language). English has about 44 phonemes – depending on dialect, it may be a few more or a few less – but only 26 letters to write them.  As a result of this fact and the factors listed in module 2, there is not a 1:1 relationship between phonemes and graphemes in English orthography.  Effective, efficient phonics programs begin with the simplest correspondences (usually CVC syllables like cat or dog in English) and progress systematically to the most rare/complicated (e.g. OUGH).  

Module 4 provides a list of New Orleans features that may affect your instruction in a New Orleans classroom; some of these features — notably, the deletion of post-vocalic /r/, and the replacement of interdental sounds (the sounds represented by TH in writing) with alveolars stops (/t/, /d/, so that that becomes dat)  — may make it a little harder for speakers of some dialects to learn to read than it is for others;3  this may require some explicit instruction in standard pronunciation to overcome.

Important facts about teaching Phonics-Sound-Symbol Relationships

• Teach letter sounds first, then letter names. Introduce lower-case letters before teaching upper-case letters.  Teaching letter sounds first and matching the sounds to the letter second is more valuable. For Example, the Teacher- points to the letter t and says this LETTER makes the /t/, /t/, /t/ sound as at the beginning of the word tiger.  Instead of saying the name of the letter is “tee,” the sound is /t/. Teachers should refer to the letter sounds more often than the name of the letters.

• Introduce vowel sounds using words with the short vowel sound at the beginning of the word (in initial position) For example, short a=apple, e=egg, i=igloo, o=octagon, and u=up 

• Introduce short vowel sounds using words in which they are not followed by a nasal sound. For example, do not teach the short /a/ sound as in the word ran. The /n/ distorts the /æ/ sound in that word.  Begin with a rhyme like /æt/ (sat, mat, fat) and explicitly explain to the children (who will likely hear the difference) that the vowel changes when it is followed by a /n/ or /m/ because your brain is getting ready for that /n/ so it opens up your nose early.  You can try to pronounce rat and ran slowly to illustrate the difference, or you can plug your noses and see how funny you sound trying to pronounce words with /n/ and /m/ to illustrate that air flows through the nose when you're making those sounds.

• Students must learn the short vowel sounds to the point of mastery to blend c-v-c words easily and quickly.

Activity: Phonics and Blending instruction to help New Orleans children pronounce the beginning and endings of words; “Say it, Move it” and Slide and Say activities with an emphasis on the beginning and the ending of words. Sound Symbol Relationship for c, t, m, s and the short vowel sound a.

FCRR Phonics Activities:

K-1st grade Variant Correspondences: P. 049 Vowel Slide  

K-1st grade Variant Correspondences: P.051 R-Controlled Spin 

2nd-3rd grade Variant Correspondences: P.023 "R" Caterpillars 

Activity: Phoneme-Grapheme Mapping activity with the following words: there, they, these, etc. This activity will allow students to map the sounds they hear in these words to the spelling of these words. 

Steps:

Teacher: How many sounds do you hear in the word they? 

Student: 2

Teacher: Let’s spell the sounds you hear. What is the first sound? 

Student: /th/?

Teacher: How do you spell it? 

Student: t-h. 

Teacher: How many letters? 

Student: 2

Teacher: How many sounds? 

Student: 1.

Teacher: What is the second sound? 

Student: /ey/?

Teacher: How do you spell it? 

Student: e-y. 

Teacher: How many letters? 

Student: 2

Teacher: How many sounds? 

Student: 1.

List A: Common words in which New Orleans students often drop the /r/.

car

father

card

bigger

cardboard

beer

court

Use the phoneme-grapheme mapping activity to practice including the /r/. (phonics lesson)

Key to reading success – both decoding and comprehension – is the development of vocabulary (students will also learn new words via reading, but at the early stages, word recognition aids in making crucial grapheme-sound correspondences).  In Module 4 we presented some key New Orleans vocabulary items that may differ from other dialects.  It will of course be key for students to learn the vocabulary of academic language, but lexical items are excellent starting points for building acceptance and appreciation, and including local terms in your pedagogy may well provide for greater buy-in.  

New Orleans Dialect-Vocabulary Development

• Identifying common words and phrases in the New Orleans dialect

  • Buku

  • Neutral ground

  • Make groceries

  • Huckabuck/huckle buck/frozen cup/zip cup

  • Dressed

  • Cold Drink

  • Podna/padna

• Building Vocabulary through Storytelling and Folktales

• Word games and activities incorporating local language

FCRR Vocabulary Activities:

• K-1st grade Word Meaning:          V. 012 Multiple Meaning Bugs 

• K-1st Grade Word Meaning:         V.015 Word Wizard

• 2ND - 3rd grade Word Meaning:     V.017 Word Wrap 

• 2nd- 3rd Grade Words in Context:  V.032 Multiple Meaning Match 

-Use New Orleans Language for this activity

Comprehension may be particularly affected by vocabulary and sentence structure.  While searching for key ideas is something that speakers of all dialects may struggle with, we are concerned here with the potential for students in the New Orleans classroom to misunderstand, without realizing it, the basic meaning of the sentences that comprise a text.  In Module 4 we presented some common New Orleans words and expressions.  You  may encounter more in your classroom; should this happen, we recommend explicit discussions of the structures and words you encounter, perhaps with some additional activities.  

Reading Comprehension

• Reading and understanding texts in the New Orleans dialect

• Developing comprehension skills through New Orleans folklore

• Guided reading activities with local literature

Activities- (a) Read a New Orleans (folklore) containing the New Orleans dialect and discuss the story.  Have students rewrite a few pages into SE or vice versa. (b) Complete a guided reading activity using a book with New Orleans dialect.

FCRR Comprehension Activities:

• K-1st grade Sentence Meaning: C.004 Silly Sentence Mix up

• k-1st grade Sentence Meaning: C.005 Build a Sentence

• 2nd-3rd grade Narrative Text Structure:  C. 008 Retell Ring

• 2nd-3rd grade Narrative Text Structure:  C.004 Story Book 

-Use New Orleans Language for these activities.

Fluency has been shown to best be developed via repeated reading and, for polysyllabic words, by breaking words into chunks (by underlining vowels, identifying known syllable structures, and similar activities).  This skill is not affected by dialect except as a byproduct of earlier acquisition strategies – in other words, teaching grapheme-sound correspondences may vary dialectally, but whichever correspondence you’ve learned must then be practiced to automaticity.  Practice is universal.  A few suggestions for fluency activities are linked here:

FCRR Fluency Activities:

• K-1st grade Words:  F.007 Speedy Rime Words

• K-1st grade Connected Text:  F. 014 Speedy Phrases

• 2nd-3rd grade Chunked Text: F. 016 Chunk-King

• 2nd-3rd grade Word Parts:     F.005 Syllable Speed Practice

-Use New Orleans Language for these activities.

Grammar and Sentence Structure (Contrastive Analysis Activity)

• Sentence construction in the New Orleans dialect

• Identifying and using dialect-specific grammar rules

• Writing exercises incorporating the New Orleans dialect

Writing Skills (Contrastive Analysis Activity)

• Narrative writing using the New Orleans dialect

• Descriptive writing capturing the essence of New Orleans

• Persuasive writing with a local focus

1 e.g., Bradley & Bryant 1985, Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley 1991

2 Smith et al. 1998

3 Washington et al. 2013

Bradley, Peter, and Lynette Bryant.  1985.  Rhyme and Reason in Reading and Spelling.  IARLD Monographs, 1.  Ann Arbor:  University of Michigan Press.

Byrne, Bryan, and Ruth Fielding-Barnsley.  1991.  “Evaluation of a Program to Teach Phonemic Awarness to Young Children.”  Journal of Educational Psychology 83(4): 451-55.

Smith, Sylvia  B., Deborah C. Simmons, and Edward J. Kameenui.  1998.  “Phonological Awareness:  Research Bases.”  In What reading research tells us about children with diverse learning needs:  bases and basics, edited by Deborah C. Simmons and Edward Kameenui, p. 61-127.  Mahwah:  Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.  

Washington, Julie A, Nicole Patton Terry, and Mark S. Seidenberg.  2013.  “Language variation and literacy learning: The case of African American English.”  In Handbook of language and literacy: Development and disorders (2nd edition), edited by C.A. Stone, E.R. Silliman, B.J. Ehren, K. Apel,  pp 204-201.  New York:  The Guilford Press.