Our Research
The Language Variation and Academic Success (LVAS) lab is dedicated to understanding the intersection of literacy, problem solving, language variation, and poverty. Our work focuses on the analysis of cultural dialect in assessment and identification of reading and math disabilities in school-aged African American children, and on disentangling the relationship between language production and comprehension on the development of reading, mathematical problem solving and early language skills for children growing up in poverty.
Our mission is to illuminate and affirm the gifts and challenges that African American child speakers of African American English bring to the process of learning to read, write, and communicate both within and outside of their families and communities
Publications
Washington, J. A., & Laramore, G. R. (2023, October 19). Empowering families: Supporting African American Children’s Reading Development. American Federation of Teachers. https://www.aft.org/ae/fall2023/washington_laramore
Washington, J. A., Lee‐James, R., & Stanford, C. B. (2023). Teaching phonemic and phonological awareness to children who speak African American English. The Reading Teacher. https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.2200
Lee-James, Ryan & Washington, Julie. (2018). Language Skills of Bidialectal and Bilingual Children: Considering a Strengths-Based Perspective. Topics in Language Disorders. 38. 5-26. 10.1097/TLD.0000000000000142.
Washington, J. A., & Seidenberg, M. S. (2021). Teaching Reading to African American Children: When Home and School Language Differ. American Educator, 45(n2), 26–40. EJ1304333
Washington, J.A., Branum-Martin, L., Lee, R.J & Sun, C. (2019). Reading and Language Performance of Low-Income, African American Boys in Grades 1 – 5. Reading and Writing Quarterly, 35(1), 42 – 64.
Washington, J.A., Branum-Martin, L., Sun, C. & Lee, R.J. (2018). The Impact of Dialect Density on the Growth of Language and Reading in African American children. Language Speech and Hearing Services in Schools, 49(2), 232 – 247. (winner of 2019 ASHA Editor’s award)
Brown, M. C., Sibley, D. E., Washington, J. A., Rogers, T. T., Edwards, J. R., MacDonald, M. C., & Seidenberg, M. S. (2015). Impact of dialect use on a basic component of learning to read. Frontiers in Psychology, 6. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00196
Rhodes, K. T., Branum-Martin, L., Morris, R. D., Romski, M., & Sevcik, R. A. (2015). Testing math or testing language? The construct validity of the KeyMath-Revised for children with intellectual disability and language difficulties. American journal on intellectual and developmental disabilities, 120(6), 542-568.
Rhodes, K. T., Lukowski, S., Branum-Martin, L., Opfer, J., Geary, D. C., & Petrill, S. A. (2019). Individual differences in addition strategy choice: A psychometric evaluation. Journal of Educational Psychology, 111(3), 414.
Rhodes, K. T., Branum-Martin, L., Washington, J. A., & Fuchs, L. S. (2017). Measuring arithmetic: A psychometric approach to understanding formatting effects and domain specificity. Journal of educational psychology, 109(7), 956.
Branum-Martin, L., Rhodes, K. T., Sun, C., Washington, J. A., & Webb, M. Y. (2019). Developing a longitudinal scale for language: Linking across developmentally different versions of the same test. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 62(6), 1859-1874.