Little is known about mismatches between the language of mathematics testing instruments and the rich linguistic repertoires that African American children develop at home and in the community. The current study aims to provide a proof of concept and novel explanatory item response design that uses error analysis to investigate the relationship between AAE child language and chil- dren’s mathematics assessment outcomes. Here, we illustrate 2nd and 3rd grade children’s qualitative patterns of performance on arithmetic tasks in relation to their AAE dialect use and elaborate a unified framework for examining child and item level linguistic characteristics. Results suggest that children draw upon their emerging (bi)dialectal repertoire with arithmetic problems when selecting appropriate problem-solving strategies on language-formatted problems. The mismatch of assessment language formatting with children’s repertoires may disadvantage AAE speakers’ strategy selections and result in a language-based performance disadvantage unrelated to mathematical ability.
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Language Use and Development in Third-Person Singular Contexts: Assessment Implications
Purpose: The purpose of this assessment-focused clinical focus article is to increase familiarity with African American English (AAE)–speaking children’s pattern of language use in third- person singular contexts and to discuss implications for speech- language assessments of developing AAE-speaking children. Method: The clinical focus draws on descriptive case study data from four typically developing child speakers of AAE who are between the ages of 3 and 5 years. The children’s data from three different sources—sentence imitation, story retell, and play-based language samples—were subjected to linguistic analyses. Results: The three sources of linguistic data offered different insights into the children’s production of –s and other linguistic patterns in third-person singular contexts. Conclusions: This study underscores the importance of exploring developing child AAE from a descriptive approach to reveal different types of information about patterns of morphological marking in different linguistic contexts, which is crucial in assessing developing AAE. Implications for language assessment are discussed.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1744503
- PAR ID:
- 10292426
- Editor(s):
- Storkel, Holly L; Mills, Monique M
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Language speech hearing services in schools
- Volume:
- 52
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 1558-9129
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 16-30
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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