About our work
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.
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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
Research Interests
Statistical learning and Translanguaging in Education: Leveraging Language Assets for Reading (STELLAR)
Project STELLAR aims to develop and test a specific, research-informed approach to teaching reading to AAE-speaking children that integrates, honors and affirms their cultural-linguistic assets, improves their reading fluency, and by implication comprehension of text. We will accomplish this by leveraging children’s implicit knowledge of patterns that exist in language and text using a translanguaging approach.
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Teaching African American Children to Read
The impact of African American English (AAE) on learning to read and write is a central focus of the LVAS lab. Our focus on the intersection of language variation and literacy is designed to identify both the strengths and the challenges faced by African American children as they acquire print-based skills. Research in our lab and others has demonstrated that AAE impacts reading and writing in predictable ways. Our goal in the LVAS lab is to identify instruction, curricula and assessments that create obstacles for African American children and simultaneously to develop assessments, to modify existing practices and to identify additional variables that may benefit readers and writers who speak AAE.
Demonstrating Language Competence in Assessment
Children who speak AAE are often disadvantaged on standardized language assessments.
Traditional language assessments focus on competence in General American English (GAE),
thereby underestimating the language knowledge and competence of children who speak AAE.
The LVAS lab is focused on improving understanding and outcomes, as well as development of
language assessments that move beyond language performance, permitting AAE speakers to
demonstrate their language competence.
Translanguaging and AAE
Translanguaging challenges traditional notions that a bidialectal, child is learning to switch
between two distinct codes. Importantly, in translanguaging paradigms students who speak
AAE are given access to their full linguistic repertoires as they learn to internalize and integrate
rules and to map the literate, school code onto their existing oral code, the code of their homes
and communities. The LVAS lab is focused on examining and identifying strategies for effective
integration of AAE knowledge into literacy learning in African American children acquiring early
literacy skills.
Mathematical Problem-Solving
Mathematical ability is regularly tested using word problems to represent children’s understandings of “real world,” applied mathematical problem-solving. Even when these word problems are read aloud to overcome any potential reading demands, they still require children to navigate the linguistic representations of General American English in order to understand and mentally represent the problems they are being asked to solve. In this way, mathematical word problems present African American children who use AAE with an implicit challenge to traverse the linguistic codes of GAE in order to demonstrate their mathematical competence. The LVAS lab examines the ways in which these inherent demands for linguistic problem-solving may unintentionally bias measurements of mathematical ability for children who use AAE.