Leveraging students' home language knowledge to support literacy learning

A young female teacher sits on a chair in a classroom and holds and points at a book on her lap that is open and facing a group of young students sitting on the floor in a semicircle around her.

Through the Strategies to Improve Reading (STIR) partnership, Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) Midwest works with Michigan educators and school leaders to advance K-2 literacy instruction and improve student reading skills by integrating evidence-based strategies and culturally and linguistically responsive practices.

In Part I of a two-part conversation on how teachers can leverage students' language knowledge by recognizing and celebrating students' cultural backgrounds in literacy instruction, STIR Literacy Coach Christina Grayson speaks with Dr. Ryan Lee-James, chief academic officer at the Atlanta Speech School and director of the Rollins Center for Language and Literacy. Dr. Lee-James is a speech-language pathologist and researcher with expertise in language development, language disorders, and reading disabilities in the context of dialect differences and equity.

Multilingual students refers to students who speak or are learning to speak more than one language.

Christina Grayson: Most classrooms are made up of students with diverse language experiences. Understanding different aspects of language variation helps educators teach literacy effectively, especially for multilingual or multidialectal learners. How do you differentiate between speech communities and language varieties or dialects?

Dr. Ryan Lee-James: A speech community is any group of people, young or old, who share communication, speech, and language norms and general rules of engagement resulting from close contact over time. These groups usually have a shared value system closely tied to their culture and identities. These norms and value systems are often unspoken, yet members of the speech community demonstrate subconscious understanding through "appropriate" interactions with others in the community.

Dialect overlaps with, but is different from, a speech community. Dialects are rule-governed language systems--we all speak one! Importantly, many dialects are oral, which means they do not have a written system. If speakers can understand each other fairly easily with little to no breakdown in meaning of message, they may be speaking dialects of a language (e.g., General American English and African American English), whereas speakers of different languages (e.g., English and Spanish) will be able to understand very little, if any, of the message.

We talk about the concept of mutual intelligibility to better help us think about the difference between dialects and languages. A General American English speaker could understand the content of an African American English speaker. They might have some different grammatical, sound pronunciation, even some different meaning understandings. But overall, [given] those two dialects and between those two speakers, we could consider that they're mutually intelligible generally speaking.

Grayson: Why does understanding dialects and speech communities matter in equitable instruction?

Pragmatic language refers to the social language skills that we use in our daily interactions with others. These skills include what we say, how we say it, our nonverbal communication (for example, eye contact, facial expressions, body language, and so on), and how appropriate our interactions are in a given situation.

Dr. Lee-James: From a strengths-based place, we should recognize that every child belongs to a speech community and speaks one or more dialects. When they come to school, they have learned all that they know about speech and language from their speech community. That's an asset. And we should celebrate it, and we should leverage it to get them to learn the skills that they need to be successful with reading, writing, and spelling. Teachers should be trying to learn as much as they can about a given speech community, including pragmatic aspects of the speech community.

Pragmatics drive much of how we perceive children and families. Think about how many teachers have referred to young Black kids as unengaged or uninterested based on how they engage or their tone of voice. Those nonverbals and aspects of speech like pitch, rate, and tone can differ fundamentally from the General American English dialect. Speakers have learned these communication and language norms from their speech community. If teachers knew and appreciated these differences, it would likely impact their views and approach.

Grayson: I like to prompt teachers to think about how students use oral language and consider it as data they can use to plan and deliver instruction. Knowing how students use words and in which order, how students pronounce sounds within words, how those things are valid, and how they show up similarly or differently in print, can help teachers design effective, strengths-based instruction. What other first steps can educators take to leverage students' language assets?

Dr. Lee-James: Start your cultural humility journey and keep it going. Project READY is a great collection of modules with prompts you can use to scaffold yourself and support your learning. Come back to these tools often. There are many reasons why this practice should be the cornerstone of our profession as educators. A few of the most important reasons are because our views, beliefs, and biases will impact expectations we establish for students, language we use to engage with students and families, and practices we employ to support student learning--all of which contribute to overall student success.

Watch for Part 2 of the conversation, which will cover early literacy instructional strategies that advance equity in phonemic awareness, phonics, and vocabulary development.

Related resources

Browse the following resources to learn more about the use of culturally responsive practices to strengthen literacy instruction and how REL Midwest is supporting their use through the STIR partnership.

REL Midwest resources: