Julie Washington

Watch the full Reading Rockets webcast, From Babbling to Books: Building Pre-Reading Skills, featuring Washington, Todd Risley, and Sharon Landesman Ramey discussing research-based strategies for developing language and pre-reading skills in young children.

Teaching African American Children to Read

We need to value and respect every child’s home language, not suppress it. If we are quick to “correct” examples of language varieties in speaking and writing — our students will become afraid to read. 

Dr. Julie Washington

Dr. Julie Washington teaches us how to take full advantage of our students’ oral language “repertoire” to become skilled fluent readers. As a speech-language pathologist, researcher, and fellow at the University of California in Irvine, her work focuses on the intersection of literacy, language variation, and poverty in African American children from preschool through fifth grades. She explains how to bridge African American English to print — a critical skill for reading, writing, and spelling. Watch and learn how to take what you already know about teaching reading and adapt it so it works for everybody. This video is one of the timely talks from our sister project, Reading Universe (opens in a new window).

Chapters

• 00:00 Chapter 1: What Is Language Variation? 
• 11:30 Chapter 2: What Is African American English? 
• 14:51 Chapter 3: How Does African American English Work? 
• 23:06 Chapter 4: What We’ve Learned About Dialect? 
• 28:48 Chapter 5: Why Does Language Variation Matter So Much? 
• 31:00 Chapter 6: The Mismatch Between Oral and Written Language 
• 34:58 Chapter 7: Easing the Cognitive Load on Our Students 
• 38:36 Chapter 8: Dialect Density 
• 44:33 Chapter 9: How Can We Do Better?

Biography

Julie Washington is a Professor in the School of Education at the University of California – Irvine (UCI). She is a Speech-Language Pathologist and is a Fellow of the American Speech Language Hearing Association. Dr. Washington directs the California Learning Disabilities Research Innovation Hub at UCI. She is also director of the Language Variation, Poverty and Academic Success lab. Her research is focused on the intersection of literacy, language variation, and poverty in African American children from preschool through fifth grades. In particular, her work focuses on understanding the role of cultural dialect in assessment outcomes, identification of reading disabilities in school-aged African American children, and on disentangling the relationship between language production and comprehension in the development of early reading and language skills for children growing up in poverty. 

Dr. Washington brings to this work a deep understanding of the impact of within language differences on development of early reading, writing and language skills of African American children. She has led several large projects funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development focused on literacy and language variation. Currently, she is working on development of assessment protocols for use with high density dialect speakers that are designed to improve our ability to measure their linguistic competence. This work is funded by the National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders at the NIH.