Black Dialect Shift in Oral Reading.

Johnson, an associate professor of education at the University of California, Berkeley, has written numerous articles on the problems of teaching Black children. ■ Speakers of nonstandard dialects often "translate" a reading passage into their own dialect during oral reading. Specifically, a speaker of nonstandard dialect changes whole words or parts of words printed in the text from the way they are printed and should be readthe expected response (ER)to how they are spoken (or not spoken) in a nonstandard dialect-the observed response (OR). This change is a translation without a loss in comprehension. This phenomenon, when it occurs during oral reading, is a dialect shift. It is emphasized that a dialect shift occurs whenever