HESP Seminar: Arynn Byrd & Kathleen Oppenheimer (HESP)

Identifying Disorders Within Dialects: Applying Knowledge of African American English to Clinical Decisions in Schools

Abstract: Kathleen and Arynn will be giving a practice talk for their upcoming seminar at the ASHA Convention titled Identifying disorders within dialects: Applying knowledge of African American English to clinical decisions in schools. This seminar approaches discussion of African American English (AAE) from a sociolinguistic framework and discusses techniques to diagnose and treat disorders within different dialects and with students from diverse linguistic backgrounds. We relate phonological and grammatical features of AAE to patterns found in historical language change and contemporary language variation in languages around the world, providing clinicians with a set of tools for thinking about and describing language variation. We use the framework of identifying disorders within a dialect to highlight that all children with a language disorder have a disorder within a dialect and provide concrete examples of wording that SLPs can use to describe a child’s AAE use in IEP meetings and in reports.