Julie Washington
Julie Washington, Ph.D., is a Professor in the School of Education at the University of California – Irvine (UCI). She is a Speech-Language Pathologist and is a Fellow of the American Speech-Language Hearing Association. Dr. Washington directs the California Learning Disabilities Research Innovation Hub at UCI. She is also director of the Dialect, Poverty and Academic Success lab. Her research is focused on the intersection of literacy, language variation, and poverty in African American children from preschool through fifth grades. Specifically, her work focuses on understanding the role of cultural dialect in assessment outcomes, identification of reading disabilities in school-aged African American children, and on disentangling the relationship between language production and comprehension in the development of early reading and language skills for children growing up in poverty. Currently, she is working on the development of assessment protocols for use with high-density dialect speakers that are designed to improve our ability to measure their linguistic competence. This work is funded by the National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders of the National Institutes of Health.
Thought Leader Session Description
Uplifting Language Variation in the Classroom: The Role of Translanguaging for supporting Diverse Language Users
Julie Washington
(Equity & Inclusion, ELL, Components of Literacy Instruction)
Language variation is a fact of life; within language, variants develop for any major, spoken language. Children who develop a language variety within their homes and communities are called bidialectal. Despite the prevalence of language varieties and bidialectalism they are not well understood, and often not well-respected in the educational context. Yet it is well known that children who use these varieties present unique challenges in classrooms for both teaching and learning, and this is especially true for teaching reading and writing. This session will discuss the theory of translanguaging, which challenges traditional notions of what it means for a child to develop and use two linguistic codes. The promises of a translanguaging perspective for education of children who are bidialectal will be presented.
Target Audience: Early Childhood (Birth – 4 years), Elementary
Education Track(s): New to the Science of Reading, Advanced Science of Reading, Equity & Inclusion
Concurrent Session Description
Teaching Reading to Children Who Speak Varieties of English
Julie A. Washington
(Equity & Inclusion, ELL, Components of Literacy Instruction)
Teaching reading to children who speak language varieties that differ in important ways from the structure of print adds an additional layer of complexity to learning to read and to reading instruction. These differences have been found to impact many language-based academic areas including reading, writing, spelling, and mathematics. For African American children, in particular, research has demonstrated that the language of the home and community must be considered when teaching literacy skills. This presentation addresses the use of dialect in African American children, presenting strategies that teachers can use in the classroom to support literacy development.
Target Audience: Elementary
Education Track(s): New to the Science of Reading, Advanced Science of Reading, Equity & Inclusion