Examining Language and Risk: Linguistic Difference and the Development of Early Reading Skills

Children who enter school speaking a culturally-based community dialect that differs from the language they will encounter at school are at high risk for slow or poor reading development. The cognitive load experienced by these children as they work to reconcile their spoken language system with the language of literacy has received little attention, despite the significant, documented difficulty with reading development faced by these children. The children who are most likely to struggle with learning Mainstream American English (MAE) are children growing up in poverty who use a cultural dialect. Poverty introduces an additional risk factor that further complicates reading development. African American children, a group that is disproportionately poor and uses a cultural dialect that differs from MAE in rule-governed, predictable ways, are an example of a group that has historically struggled with reading. Indeed, fewer than 20% of African American fourth graders nationwide attain grade level reading skills. Despite this alarming statistic, poor African American children are less likely than their more affluent peers to be identified with a reading disability. The comingling of poverty, race, and linguistic difference complicates identification of reading disabilities in a population in which 8 out of 10 children will struggle to learn to read. This presentation will focus on current efforts to improve identification in order to prevent long term reading difficulties in low-income, elementary school-aged African American children.