Teaching African American Children to Read, with Julie Washington, Ph.D.

Main ideas, concepts, and lessons

• Language variation (dialects) is normal, rule-governed, and affects reading-relevant language systems.

  • Language variation includes differences in language use by region, race, and ethnicity (e.g., Southern English, Spanglish, Chicano English, African American English).
  • Dialects are rule-governed variations within a language and can vary at small or large geographic scales (even within cities).

• Dialects are not slang and not “incorrect.”

  • Dialects are not slang.
  • Dialects are not ungrammatical.
  • Dialects are not incorrect.
  • Educators’ beliefs about a child’s language system shape how they respond in classrooms.

• Dialect influences multiple domains of language—not just pronunciation.

  • Morphology (meaning units in words): e.g., potential omission of certain morphemes.
  • Phonology (sound): impacts how speech maps to print.
  • Syntax (sentence structure).
  • Pragmatics (use in context).
  • Semantics (word meaning and usage).

• Everybody speaks a dialect.

  • Even people who seem “dialect-free” (e.g., from Seattle) speak a regional dialect.

• Children are “expert language users” in their home systems when they enter school.

  • Language is innate and learned through community participation.
  • Schools are also a communication context with their own rules (“community of speakers” includes teachers, children, principal, etc.).
  • The teaching task is to map instruction onto what children already know, not treat them as blank slates.

• African American English (AAE) is systematic and overlaps in structure with “General American English” but differs in specific rule-governed ways.

  • Core idea: AAE features affect what teachers may hear and expect during reading/writing.

• Prestige bias harms learning (and children).

  • AAE is often treated as low prestige, leading to bias (e.g., assuming poor education or character from accents/features).
  • Mislabeling home language as “ungrammatical” causes harm and can reduce children’s willingness to participate.

• A key reading problem is not simply “difference,” but how far oral language and print differ.

  • Mismatch hypothesis: when oral language and print don’t match, learning to read becomes harder and requires more trials/cognitive effort.
  • Cognitive load: greater effort to connect speech to print can leave fewer resources for meaning.

• Dialect density and linguistic distance predict reading difficulty better than dialect “presence.”

  • Dialect usage exists on a continuum:
    • Low density users: fewer utterances affected by dialect features.
    • Moderate users: some features present.
    • High density users: >50% of utterances contain dialect features.
  • High density (greater linguistic distance between oral language and print) is linked to the most struggle with reading.

• Reading instruction should not suppress home language; it should build from it.

  • Suppressing children’s language can silence them and impede learning.
  • Dialect should be affirmed and incorporated while teaching the language of classroom and books.
  • This approach is supported by the concept of translanguaging:
    • Children need access to their full linguistic repertoire to learn.
    • Home-language use should be treated as resource, not error.

• Why this matters academically (achievement gaps).

  • Many African American students read below basic/proficient levels in later elementary grades.
  • The “gap” tends to widen over time rather than close.
  • The speaker argues that language-based mismatches and instructional practices that ignore dialect contribute to poor reading comprehension and meaning extraction.

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Methodology / instructional guidance (detailed bullet points)

How educators should conceptualize the goal

• Teach reading and writing while:
  • respecting the child’s home dialect/system,
  • integrating that system into instruction,
  • and extending what children already know to meet print’s requirements.

Classroom practices recommended (what to do / how to do it)

• Treat home dialect as systematic and meaningful

  • Don’t label dialect forms as “ungrammatical.”
  • Assume children are expert users of their home system.

• Use an “extension” rather than “correction” approach

  • Example approach for oral errors that reflect dialect:
    • If a child says “aks” for “ask”, respond by adding the print/standard form without public humiliation:
      • “You said ‘ask’ this way. There’s another way to say it: ‘ask.’ Let’s see what that looks like. Let’s write it.”
  • Avoid stopping a child publicly and forcing repeated re-saying that creates embarrassment.

• Don’t suppress language use during reading

  • Encourage reading opportunities so children will demonstrate what they know.
  • Reduce fear of reading aloud being judged as “wrong.”

• Provide more opportunities to read and interact with text

  • More than a “reading block” length matters:
    • Ensure children have ample chances to practice reading and meaning-making.
  • Recognize that some dialect readers rely on their oral system to decode/understand; that process should be leveraged.

• Build bridges from oral language to print language

  • Teach the language of print/classroom, but through mapping from what children already do orally.
  • Aim to reduce the cognitive load so learners can focus on meaning, not just word-level accuracy.

• Use translanguaging principles

  • Do not rush to eliminate home language.
  • Allow children access to their full repertoire to support learning tasks.
  • Use home language strategically as scaffolding, similar to how multilingual learners may use one language to support another.

Teaching implications for writing/reading features (AAE examples mentioned)

• Recognize that children may:

  • omit or vary morphemes in speech (e.g., plural -s, past -ed, third-person singular -s),
  • differ in subject-verb agreement patterns (e.g., “They was…”),
  • show variable use of copula forms (is/are),
  • use habitual “be” to convey habitual meaning,
  • use imminent action constructions (e.g., “fixing to / finna / bout to / spose to”),
  • use multiple negation systematically in meaningful ways.

• In instruction:

  • extend oral competencies into written obligations:
    • print requires certain final morphemes more consistently (“obligatory” in writing).
  • Teach subject-verb agreement and required print forms during reading aloud and writing tasks.

Long-range framing for teachers/clinicians

• Focus on transition:
  • early grades may show adequate word reading,
  • but later comprehension and complex language demands create difficulty.
• Determine supports across tiers (Tier 1/2/3):
  • incorporate dialect-aware strategies in literacy and clinical practice,
  • drawing parallels to bilingual education where appropriate.

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Key examples used to illustrate the ideas

• “Are You My Mother?” retell example:

  • A child who cannot read decodes/story-retells from pictures using home-language patterns.
  • Demonstrates how oral language recoding requires heavy memory/effort and how mismatch can create cognitive load.

• Classroom humiliation example (from Seidenberg/Wu-related discussion):

  • Teacher publicly corrects a child repeatedly (“aks” vs “ask”), leading the child to stop reading.
  • Used to show the harm of suppression and public correction.

• South Africa language example (speech competition):

  • A child delivers speech in home language perfectly, then switches to English perfectly.
  • Illustrates translanguaging: home language can support high-performance in another language.

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Speakers / sources featured (identified at end)

Featured speaker

• Julie Washington, Ph.D. (professor, School of Education, University of California, Irvine; speech-language pathologist)

Named researchers / cited contributors

• Margaret Burchinal (2011 study on reading achievement gaps worsening)
• Mark Seidenberg (University of Wisconsin; computational modeling work testing mismatch hypothesis)
• Johnson (1969) (mismatch hypothesis origin attribution)
• P.D. Eastman (author of Are You My Mother?)
• Ofelia García (translanguaging/language-as-verb framing credited)
• Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan (mentioned collaborator; bilingualism/parallel thinking for dialect speakers)

Video/production sources (organizational credits mentioned)

• National Institutes of Health (NIH) (support mentioned)
• Reading Universe (service of WETA, Washington, D.C., plus partners)
• Camilla Britton (video editor)
• Connor McDonald (multimedia producer)
• Tami Mount (project manager)
• Noel Gunther (executive producer)
• Jim and Donna Barksdale, American Federation of Teachers, Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation, and three anonymous donors (funding/support mentioned)

Program/platform references

• ReadingUniverse.org
• WETA (Washington, D.C.)
• Barksdale Reading Institute
• First Book
• YouTube channel @RUTeaching