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Last Friday, Chicago’s Erikson Institute convened a group of stakeholders to consider recent research and educational practices touching bilingualism and bidialectism. While much of my work concerns Dual Language Learners—and other students striving to become bilingual—I knew very little about how students’ dialects can affect their educational trajectories.

Jana Fleming, Director of Erikson’s Herr Research Center, opened the event by noting that the process of adding a dialect is “similar, but not identical” to the process of adding a language. To that end, she warned educators against marginalizing students who speak non-standard varieties of English. This “normative bias” towards standard English can delegitimize students’ cultural backgrounds. In addition, students who are unfamiliar with standard English conventions can struggle with academic materials presented solely in standard English dialect.

As part of the event,  presented his research on how students can acquire multiple dialects. In , Wolfram found that students’ usage of dialect dropped in their first four years of schooling, only to rise again in middle school and then decrease during (and after) high school. He suggested that increases in non-standard dialect usage in middle school (and early high school) reflected the influence that adolescents have on one another.

Just as we avoid treating non-English languages as obstacles for Dual Language Learners, it’s important to recognize non-standard dialects of English as assets. They are not obstacles to be overcome, but foundations for unique and broad language competencies. The ability to shift between dialects is critical, Wolfram explained, since “school achievement correlates with capability for dialect shifting.”

Of course, inability to shift dialects can also severely limit a student’s options once they reach adulthood. Wolfram showed this video, noting that there are more than two million estimated instances of housing discrimination each year in the United States.

Wolfram’s professional interests have personal roots. As part of the presentation, he shared his own language story. As a young child, he consciously worked to replace his German-accented English with his peers’ Philadelphia dialect, only to later find that this marked him as a “funny-talking” curiosity on his college campus.

Hard as it can be to recognize dialect biases, however, it’s even harder to remedy them. showed that attitudes about language dialects are present in children as early as three years old. In that experiment, she told young children that they would be allowed to choose to receive a present from one of two identical boxes. Each box then “introduced” itself to the child—one “spoke” standard English, the other “spoke” an African-American dialect of English. She found that children from across the socioeconomic spectrum were more likely to believe that the box speaking standard English “talked better.”

Wolfram and others at the event explained that while these sorts of perceptions take root early, educators are uniquely positioned to help students who speak non-standard dialects of English.

First of all, teachers can take an “assets-based” view of their students’ vernacular(s). Students can learn standard English without abandoning the rich, full, and legitimate dialects they bring to school. Second, teachers can ensure that students respect the dialects of their classmates.

There is unquestionably room for teachers of young students to start this work earlier—and I’m going to explore the role of dialect in future posts on students’ use of language at school.”