Dialect and Venacular - Term Paper Example

It cannot be denied that dialect influences phonological awareness. Divergent speakers end up bypassing certain phonemes. In a study conducted by Rebecca Treiman (2004) it was established that due to this bypass, divergent speakers were more likely to spell words wrong. The study tries to find the truth in the statement whereby some phonological experts opine that spelling and reading development is affected mostly by phonology. It is how people speak that they read and/or write. The result of Treiman’s study (2004), which involved African Americans, who spoke African American Vernacular English (AAVE) as well as SAE speakers, both as participants and experimenters, showed that AAVE speakers were more likely to spell words based on how they spoke them, whereas SAE speakers made spelling errors when the experimenter calling out the words to be spelled was an AAVE speaker.

Treiman (2004) attributes this as one of the contributing factors to the lag seen in the literacy skills of African Americans. Interestingly enough, there is a positive influence of dialect on phonological awareness as well. People used to, or growing up with, vernacular differing from SAE are actually more phonologically aware than those who only use SAE. Those speaking dialects are often in minority and have to learn the “standard” way of speech as well, or at least be able to understand it orally.

For this reason, divergent speakers often have fine-tuned phonological awareness, as they are much more conscious of the differences of phonetics between their own vernacular and the standard speech. This hypothesis was also put forward by Sligh and Conners’ 2003 study, in which they stated that it could be possible that divergent speakers developed “good phonological processing skills, due to their experience with two dialects in which there are phonological differences” (p. 222). There needs to be more research done with this regard, however.

It is often taken to be a fact that vernacular and speech have a direct relationship with reading skills. Children who come from a background where Standard American English (or SAE, as Sligh and Conners term it in their 2003 study) is not used, instead being replaced by a dialect, are often expected to give low results with regard to their reading skills. It is thought that as their vernacular does not allow them to use SAE, they will not be able to learn to read it either. Perhaps this has got more to do with prejudice than reality.

As Goodman and Buck opine (1997), often teachers confuse language difference with language deficiency, thus undermining the divergent speakers’ ability to learn to read normally, like those other than him, as well as hampering their self-confidence. There is a “linguistic discrimination” (Goodman & Buck, 1997, p. 455), which can be, and often is, the cause of low reading skills and reading impairment in divergent speakers. This attitude often is responsible for a vicious cycle in which the teacher, unintentionally, lowers the linguistic self-confidence of the divergent reader, causing him or her to be hesitant in learning, and because of this hesitancy the basic false assumption of the teacher seems to be validated in the teacher’s eyes, i.e. the divergent speaker has reading difficulties.

Though vernacular does have an impact on reading skills (as well as writing