Overview Many African American children in Philadelphia public elementary schools can't read well. They make mistakes. Labov, et al, tried to find linguistic rules that governed the children's mistakes. To do this, they went to Woodruff Elementary School in West Philadelphia and studied children from kindergarten to fifth grade.

Average Reading Ability of 9 Year Olds, According to the NAEP

Children worked with Penn students, Woodruff staff, and high school volunteers. The children read selected illustrated books aloud in front of Penn students and Woodruff staff. The adults would only supply words to the students in three instances: (1)when the child made several errors, (2)when the child paused for five seconds, (3)when the child gave up. Two types of data were recorded: (1)words the child made no effort to pronounce, (2)words that, as read, did not make sense in context. The second type of data was more useful because it allowed the linguists to analyze why the children were making mistakes.

Letters Speakers of AAVE (which many of the children spoke), tend to use the alphabet to identify the first consonant and vowel, but nothing after that. The first questions researchers looked at was whether the reader paid attention to the letter and recognized it for what it was. Then, they analyzed whether it was interpreted correctly or not (as an individual phoneme, digraph, etc.). The third questions was whether or not the letters were used coherently to make the correct words.

Onset

Nucleus

Coda

Inflectional Suffixes

What All This Means The Woodruff school's teaching method concentrates highly on CVC structure. It is no surprise, then, that the readers made the fewest mistakes when reading words following this structure. However, the amount of mistakes they made elsewhere suggests that the way of teaching phonics at the school should be changed. Labov, et al., suggest that more time be spent teaching consonant sounds in the coda position (especially at the end of words), and vowel sounds in the nucleus position and at the end of words. Also, any lesson that centers on the beginning of the word should compare the sounds of letters at the beginning, middle, and end of words.