An Efficacy Study of Toggle Talk

The purpose of this project is to test the efficacy of Toggle Talk, a Language Arts curriculum supplement that teaches kindergarten and first grade African American children to understand the differences between Mainstream American English (MAE) and African American English (AAE) with the goal of improving students' reading outcomes. Many African American children underachieve in school and the researchers propose that part of the explanation for this is dialect mismatch, which occurs when the dialects children hear at home and in the classroom differ. Many young African American children speak AAE at home while MAE is typically the language of instruction in schools. Research has shown that the AAE-speaking children who have the poorest literacy outcomes are those who have the most trouble shifting between AAE and MAE as is appropriate for the context (e.g. shifting to MAE in the classroom). Toggle Talk is an intervention developed and studied in two previous studies funded by the Institute (Developing Contrastive Analysis Techniques for Teaching Academic Classroom English to Young African American English-Speaking Students; Exploring the Contribution of Social, Cognitive, and Linguistic Factors on the Development of Style Shifting by Young African-American English-speaking Students Learning to Read). It aims to teach AAE-speaking kindergarten and first grade students how to shift between AAE and MAE in spoken language.