African American Vernacular English

Abstract

African American Vernacular English (AAVE) causes reading problems for majority of the African American students who speak it. There is a strong concern of whether African Americans will perform adequately on the job front, due to low reading levels (Rickford, 1999). Although AAVE is a dialect shared by many African Americans, they need to be able to have proficient Standard English in order to move forward and become successful in America (Rickford, 1999). African Americans have been, and still are performing poorly in reading and have very low academic achievement throughout the nation (Rickford, 1999). Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) Ecological Systems theory was use to determine possible factors contributing to the reading problems that AAVE speaking children face when trying to learn Standard English. For the purposes of this inquiry, of the four systems in the theory only the microsystems and mesosystems were analyzed. In order to gain a healthy understanding of African American Vernacular English and majority of its topics, an extensive amount of literature review and scholarly articles read and analyzed. The results discovered from the literature were that there are three main reasons why AAVE speaking students have reading problems.