Kathleen Oppenheimer
Member, Maryland Language Science Center
Hearing and Speech Sciences
koppen@umd.edu
0208 Lefrak
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Education
M.S., Speech, Language, and Learning, Northwestern University
Post-bac, Communication Disorders, University of Massachusetts-Amherst
A.B., Linguistics, Harvard College
Research Expertise
Education
Language Acquisition
Language Disorders
Literacy
Psycholinguistics
I'm a speech-language pathologist and a PhD student in Hearing and Speech Sciences. My clinical background informs my research interests in sentence processing in children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and in diagnostic and treatment approaches to DLD, particularly in individuals who are multilingual or speak nonmainstream dialects of English. Advisors: Yi Ting Huang, Jan Edwards Collaborators: Nan Bernstein Ratner Arynn Byrd Madison Buntrock Jan Edwards Erika Exton Julianne Garbarino Karrie Godwin Yi Ting Huang Jessica Lee Rochelle Newman Colin Phillips Amanda Owen Van Horne Lauren Salig Craig Thorburn
Publications
Does a dialect-shifting curriculum help early readers who speak African American English? Results from a randomized controlled study
There has been considerable work suggesting a negative correlation between use of a non-mainstream dialect and lower literacy scores, suggesting that early instruction on dialect differences might be helpful for non-mainstream dialect speakers.
Author/Lead: Kathleen OppenheimerMany children speak language varieties (dialects), such as African American English (AAE) that differ from the language variety typically used in academic settings and in literacy instruction (Mainstream American English, MAE). There has been considerable work suggesting a negative correlation between use of a non-mainstream dialect and lower literacy scores, suggesting that early instruction on dialect differences might be helpful for non-mainstream dialect speakers. We tested this for a population of AAE-speaking children in kindergarten and first grade. Schools were randomly assigned to teach a curriculum that explicitly compares MAE and AAE or to a business-as-usual control. While students in both the intervention and control conditions showed increased usage of MAE and greater decoding skills over time, there was no condition effect for decoding skills and minimal evidence of a condition effect for recognition of different dialects. We discuss potential limitations of the curriculum and other considerations for supporting AAE-speaking children as they start school.