I was recently asked a question from an adult literacy teacher and I
wondered what folks on this listserv think. She teaches basic decoding
skills to adults who read at about the 3rd grade level. In addition to a
language experience approach, she also spends quite a bit of time
systematically teaching them how to sound out words. Many of her African
American students, when reading and sounding out words, read certain
words, the way they speak them. So for example, they read "ask" as "aks"
and "strawberry" as "skrawberry". Since a portion of her class is
focused on teaching letter-sound correspondences and applying it to
decoding new and unknown words should she be concerned about the way
they read those words? She says that during nondecoding time, she is not
concerned, because their dialect is their dialect and is just as
acceptable as standard english. However, she wondered if she is teaching
decoding from a standard english point of view, should she be correcting
the way they read those words?
What do people think?
Daphne