Article Reflection
It has been debated that children that grow up in different countries or places where the dialect, or the way they speak is different than the customary school English have more difficulty with reading acquisition. These children have been taught dialects such as African American Vernacular English (AAVE). The dialect of African American Vernacular English is very similar to that of school English except for a few differences. Some of these differences include the reduction of final consonants. For example, /mos/ vs /most/ for the word most. Another example is the use of stops or labiodental fricatives where school English has interdental fricatives such as (/dis/ vs. /ðis/ for this, /bof/ or /bot/ vs. /boθ/ for both) are acceptable in AAVE but are not acceptable in school English.
To test this hypothesis, sentence imitation and reading skills of 217 urban African American boys and girls in kindergarten through second grade from the ages of 5 to 8 were selected from low-performing schools in low-income communities in three U.S. cities. The cities consisted of, Cleveland, Ohio; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Washington, D.C. The children that were chosen in each grade were scattered and random pertaining to their imitations of school English sentences which included phonological and grammatical forms that are used in African American Vernacular English but not in school English. The experiment consisted of several different tools that helped the researchers test there hypothesis. One of the tools used was the Woodcock Reading Mastery Tests. Three subtests were used from the Woodcock Reading Mastery Tests, one of them was word identification. This test assessed how well the subjects could read out loud words that were listed in increasing difficulty printed on a piece of paper. The second of the three subtests instructed the students to phonologically decode printed pseudowords; “word attack”.The final test of the reading achievement was a passage comprehension section. Another test that was given to test the hypothesis was a sentence imitation test. This test consisted of fifteen sentences that were given in a picture book format and were to be imitated. The student was to repeat each sentence immediately after the examiner had read it, pronouncing the sentence exactly the way the examiner had said it.
I found the results to the experiment very interesting. Results showed that only 35 percent of the children could clearly repeat 75 percent or more of the items on the grammatical scale and only 11 percent could clearly repeat the items on the phonological scale. In addition to this fascinating data, dialect differences were produced at least 75 percent of the time by 7 percent of the children on the grammatical scale and by 11 percent on the phonological scale. Another interesting piece of data I came across was the fact that New Orleans had the lowest memory scores for all grades. One possible reason for this may be that more so than in other regions, many white people not only in New Orleans but across the south speak a dialect that may share some aspects that AAVE has. With that said, fewer representations of school English may have been available for the children in the schools and in the community in the city of New Orleans compared to those in Cleveland and Washington, D.C. I also found it somewhat noteworthy the fact that Cleveland had 3 to 4 points higher in the story recall test.
In conclusion I find this article and the data of this experiment to be very beneficial to me personally because before reading the article I was not educated on many of the aspects of the experiment itself. The fact that even though a child can speak English, just in a different dialect like AAVE, he or she will still have significant trouble with reading and comprehending school English according to the test results. Personally, this experiment has also brought to my attention the importance and need of teachers or programs that can help students in foreign countries and here in America learn school English more efficiently so that when they are put in a classroom situation where school English is the primary model, they are better prepared to not only be able to speak English but also to be able to read and understand it as well.

Reference page

Charity, A. H., Scarborough, H. S., & Griffin, D. M. (2004). Familiarity with school English in African American children and its relation to early reading achievement. Child Development,75(5), 1340-1356. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2004.00744.x
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2004.00744.x/full