Examining Language and Risk: Linguistic Difference and Early Reading Skills

Children who enter school speaking a language or dialect that differs from the language that 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 also use a cultural dialect. Poverty introduces an additional risk factor that further complicates reading development. Importantly, the co-mingling 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, a group that is disproportionately poor and uses a cultural dialect that differs from MAE in rule-governed, predictable ways.

Continental breakfast and lunch are included.

About the speaker:

Dr. Julie A. Washington is a professor and the program director in Communication Sciences and Disorders at Georgia State University. In addition, Washington is an affiliate faculty of the Research on the Challenges of Acquiring Language and Literacy initiative and the Urban Child Study Center at Georgia State. Her work focuses on understanding cultural dialect use in African American children with a specific emphasis on the impact of dialect on language assessment, literacy attainment, and academic performance. Her work with preschoolers has focused on understanding and improving the emergent literacy skills necessary to support later reading proficiency in high-risk groups, with a special focus on the needs of children growing up in poverty in urban contexts. Currently, Washington is a principal investigator on the Georgia Language Disabilities Research Innovation Hub, funded by the National Institutes of Health – Eunice Shriver National Institute on Child Health and Human Development. This research hub is focused on improving early identification of reading disabilities in elementary school-aged African American children, and includes a focus on children, their families, teachers and communities.