Holding the words in our mouths: Responses to dialect variations in oral reading

Van Duinen, Deborah Vriend, & Wilson, Marilyn J. (2008). Holding the words in our mouths: Responses to dialect variations in oral reading. English Journal,97(3), 31-37.

The first author had her preservice teacher education students (all white, middle-class suburbanites), read aloud to each other from children’s books written in “nonstandard” dialects of English. She documented their reactions, and shares three exemplary ones here. “Mark” laughed at the “strange” words. “Lisa” worried about offending and read tentatively. “Dean” unconsciously “corrected” the text to make it fit his own speech better.

In my years teaching children’s literature, I have experienced some of these issues with students. I find that many speakers of the “mainstream” dialect are disturbed by literature that validates nonstandard dialects. Then there are the students whose home language is not English who feel “dissed” by those who think standard English should be “it”. I’ve even had one older African-American student who had worked to eradicate her dialect (her diction could cut glass!) and objected strenuously to sharing books with black dialect with children. “That’s the speech of slavery,” she said. This is a highly complex issue.