Variable production of African American English across oracy and literacy contexts.
Many African American students produce African American English (AAE) features that are contrastive to Standard American English (SAE). The AAE-speaking child who is able to dialect shift, that is, to speak SAE across literacy contexts, likely will perform better academically than the student who is not able to dialect shift.


METHODS
This investigation examined the AAE productions of 50 typically developing African American third graders across three language contexts-picture description, oral reading of SAE text, and writing.


RESULTS
All participants produced AAE during picture description. A downward shift in contrastive AAE features was evident between spoken discourse and the literacy contexts. More students produced more AAE features during picture description than writing. Both morphosyntactic and phonological features characterized the picture description context. Phonological features predominated during oral reading. In contrast, morphosyntactic features were the most dominant feature in writing.


CONCLUSIONS
The findings are discussed in terms of dialect-shifting abilities of African American students and the role of writing as a special context to support their entry into dialect shifting.
Thompson
Connie A
CA
University Center for the Development of Language and Literacy, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2054, USA. connietp@umich.edu
Craig
Holly K
HK
Washington
Julie A
JA
D001741:Black or African American; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D002648:Child; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D015999:Multivariate Analysis; D033262:Narration; D011932:Reading; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors; D013068:Speech Production Measurement; D014705:Verbal Behavior; D014956:Writing