Oral language expectations for African American children in grades 1 through 5.

Reference profiles for characterizing the language abilities of elementary-grade African American students are important for assessment and instructional planning. H. K.

Variable production of African American English across oracy and literacy contexts.

Unlabelled: Many African American students produce African American English (AAE) features that are contrastive to Standard American English (SAE). The AAE-speaking child who is able to dialect shift, that is, to speak SAE across literacy contexts, likely will perform better academically than the student who is not able to dialect shift.

Method: This investigation examined the AAE productions of 50 typically developing African American third graders across three language contexts-picture description, oral reading of SAE text, and writing.

Performance of elementary-grade African American students on the Gray Oral Reading Tests.

Purpose: African American students perform disproportionately more poorly on standardized reading assessments than their majority peers. Poor reading performances may be related to test biases inherent in standardized reading instruments. The purpose of this investigation was to examine the appropriateness of the Gray Oral Reading Tests-Third Edition (GORT-3; Wiederholt & Bryant, 1992) for assessing the reading abilities of elementary-grade African American students.

Phonological features of child African American English.

The production of phonological features of African American English (AAE) was examined for 64 typically developing African American children in the 2nd through the 5th grade. Students read aloud passages written in Standard American English. Sixty of the students read the passages using AAE, and 8 different phonological features were represented in their readings.