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The Beacon Fall 2021
Turning the Tide
Bidialectal Bridges: Addressing the Need for Inclusionary Language Instruction
By Annie Stutzman, MS, Associate Director of The Windward Institute
“Language is the road map of a culture, it tells you where its people come from and where they are going.” – Rita Mae Brown
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s more and more educators discover the decades-long evidence behind the Science of Reading (SoR), the field is beginning to address the foundational gaps in their pre-service programs. An even larger number of teachers have not been exposed to the imperative concepts and prejudices surrounding bidialectal language, or speaking two varieties of one language, such as African American English (AAE), and how it can influence the path of literacy for many students. As people with a stake in pedagogy, the shared intention must be to have all students achieve success in reading, and many teachers will need to unlearn the notion that children who are multilingual (speaking/reading more than one language) or bidialectal are more likely to lack proficiency in the skills needed to attain achievement in reading. While more and more schools begin to align themselves with evidencebased practices and navigate towards the incorporation of explicit, structured, sequential literacy instruction (ESSLI), it is vital for all educational communities to underscore the importance of a wider knowledge of linguistic difference in bidialectal children and how it affects student outcomes, both academically and socially. Just as a percentage of monolingual children struggle to “crack the code” due to a specific language-based learning disability,
deficits in instruction, or both, a portion of children who are bidialectal (or multilingual) will also encounter difficulties in learning to read. What is essential to understand is the difference between a learning disability and the multidimensional demands of acquiring aptitude in the rules and usage of a dialect not spoken in one's home. While many might hold onto unfounded beliefs that AAE does not follow a set of rules for usage or was an inadequate language system (Gupta, 2010), both General American English (GAE) and AAE include specific features of language, such as morphology, phonology, pragmatics, semantics, and syntax (Wolfram, et al., 1999). The same methods teachers use to instruct a child who is monolingual (learning and communicating in one language) or multilingual (learning and communicating in two or more languages at once) should be employed with a child who is operating in more than one dialect. This includes, but is not limited to: • providing sufficient opportunities to learn; • using materials and practices that are effective given the students’ backgrounds; • eliminating unwanted stigma associated with using AAE (Washington & Seidenberg, 2021).
Including common dialect variants in wholeclass lessons is one means to avoid shame associated with AAE and a powerful technique to further the classroom language development.
