One of the challenges facing any elementary school teacher in an urban, high-poverty environment is helping children who speak an African-American dialect of English.  Academic success requires students to demonstrate command of standard English grammar by the end of elementary school, and that’s not easy if students can’t understand a teacher’s academic language and a teacher can’t understand students’ speech.

Despite some public controversies, the issue is not trying to teach young black children to abandon the colloquial dialect of their community, nor is there any truth to the implication that students lack cognitive skill if they use non-standard English.  Rather, the issue is learning how to “code switch” back and forth between African-American English and Standard American English.  Research documents that students who learn to “code switch” early in their academic life advance at a faster pace.

Now, after 20 years of research, the University of Michigan has developed a curriculum for young black students to help them become skilled at code-switching between dialects.  Named ToggleTalk®, the curriculum is being marketed to school systems by the educational publisher Ventris Learning and is designed to help teachers avoid a confrontational or “correcting” approach to teaching standard English.

The curriculum was developed for kindergarteners and 1^st grade students based on research by Dr. Holly K. Craig, a professor emerita at the University of Michigan and director of the Michigan Project on Oral Language, Writing and Reading.  It comes with its own lesson plans and nine special picture books and treats African-American English as a legitimate dialect with its own set of grammar rules.

The curriculum provides teachers with the tools to show kids how to “code switch.”  The idea is to help students compare and contrast black English with standard English without describing the dialects as “wrong” and “right,” but rather as “home” and “school.”  So the goal is to help children translate between the two and get more comfortable using standard English in the classroom, learning when it’s appropriate to use one form versus the other.

“Students who can switch away from their home dialect to the standard English of classrooms have a tremendous advantage over their peers who cannot make that adaptation,” says Craig.  “Our new curriculum equips teachers with a systematic, effective and tested set of methods to bridge this language gap in positive and constructive ways.”