Teaching writing in the African American classroom: A sociolinguistic approach

This study evaluates the outcomes of a ten-week elementary language arts curriculum designed to improve the writing achievement and experiences of children who speak African American Vernacular English (AAVE). The curriculum integrated sociolinguistic research with contemporary language arts pedagogy, using multicultural children's literature to teach about regional and social language variation, and incorporating dialect-based grammar instruction (contrastive analysis) into the writing process. Six upper-elementary teachers in an urban school district in Ohio participated in a workshop on sociolinguistic diversity and subsequently implemented the curriculum with 76 students. Student outcomes were compared with two groups of students in the same school district: three classes (41 students) that participated in a partial intervention and four classes (58 students) that received no intervention.;Multiples types of quantitative and qualitative data were collected in order to evaluate the effects of the Sociolinguistic Approach intervention model. The results of the study suggest that learning about sociolinguistic variation can make a positive difference for teachers and for learners. Based on an analysis of language attitude surveys, interviews with teachers and students, classroom observations, and analyses of pre- and post-intervention writing samples, the study concludes that participation in the intervention was associated with several positive outcomes: (a) Teachers who participated in sociolinguistic training reported significantly more positive attitudes toward their students' language. (b) Children participated actively in dialect awareness lessons and demonstrated age-appropriate understandings of language variation themes. (c) Children who were taught in a learning environment where sociolinguistic diversity was actively affirmed reported greater writing self-efficacy than peers. (d) Children who were taught grammar using contrastive analysis as an editing technique demonstrated greater skill in Standard English than peers. (e) Children who were given the opportunity to use AAVE in creative writing used a variety of vernacular resources to create effective texts. (f) Children who participated in a writing process curriculum that incorporated direct instruction on language variation demonstrated growth in several traits of effective writing, including content quality, organization, author's voice, sentence fluency, and conventions.