Reading and inequity

Here, I present two abstracts of research related to reading and inequity. Clemons, Mason & O’Donnell (2023) published “Language and self-regulation: Interrelated sources of disparities in reading achievement and opportunities for reducing inequity” in School Psychology. Here’s the edited impact statement and abstract: 

Learning to read is a challenging process for most children, however, children from historically marginalized communities are more likely to enter school with less familiarity of language common to instruction and text, and limited self-regulation skills important for reading acquisition, than less-marginalized peers. Language and self-regulation develop bidirectionally, and they synergistically affect most aspects of acquiring reading proficiency. Children and youth from historically marginalized communities tend to have less expansive knowledge of academic vocabulary and dialect common to instruction and academic text (i.e., General American English), and limited self-regulation skills relevant to reading, compared to less-marginalized peers. In this article, we argue that language and self-regulation are factors in demographic-related reading opportunity gaps, and that, in addition to improving students’ access to high-quality explicit phonics instruction, understanding their interactive relationship offers opportunities for schools to reduce disparities in reading outcomes. 

The second article focuses specifically on Black children. Johnson, Graves, Jones, Phillips & Jacobs (2023) published “Understanding African American Vernacular English and Reading Achievement: Implications for the science of reading” in School Psychology. Here’s an edited abstract and impact statement:

Black children comprise 14.98% of the school-aged population in the United States and are reported to have some of the lowest reading achievement scores in the nation. The purpose of this article is to discuss issues of language, specifically African American Vernacular English (AAVE), as it relates to the reading performance of African American children. Previous research on the science of reading provides a research-based framework that is a starting point for evidence-based research that can be used to improve the reading outcomes of African American children. School psychology literature is limited in its inclusion of issues posed by deficit perspectives of AAVE with Black children and reading achievement. Given that practicing school psychologists spend significant portions of their time conducting assessments related to identifying and remediating reading problems, an increased awareness on how AAVE can impact African American children’s reading performance is necessary. Implications for research and practice will be discussed, such as inclusion of instruments to differentiate between reading difficulties and dialect differences (i.e., Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation). 

Taken together, these articles emphasize the importance of not defining dialects other than General American English (a phrase I much prefer to the Standard American English) as “less than” the way the White kids speak. I love this latter emphasis on differentiating reading difficulties and dialect differences as well as the emphasis in the first article on separating language, self-regulation, and reading skills.