Browsing by Author "Mills, Monique"
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Item Forum: Serving African American English Speakers in Schools Through Interprofessional Education & Practice(Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 2021) Mills, MoniquePurpose: African American English (AAE) speakers often face mismatches between home language and school language, coupled with negative attitudes toward AAE in the classroom. This forum, Serving African American English Speakers in Schools Through Interprofessional Education & Practice, will help researchers, parents, and school-based practitioners communicate in ways that are synergistic, collaborative, and transparent to improve educational outcomes of AAE speakers. Method: The forum includes a tutorial offering readers instructions on how to engage in community-based participatory research (Holt, 2021). Through two clinical focus articles, readers will recognize how AAE develops during the preschool years and is expressed across various linguistic contexts and elicitation tasks (Newkirk-Turner& Green, 2021) and identify markers of developmental language disorder within AAE from language samples analyzed in Computerized Language Analysis (Overton et al., 2021). Seven empirical articles employ such designs as quantitative (Byrd & Brown, 2021; Diehm & Hendricks, 2021; Hendricks & Jimenez, 2021; Maher et al., 2021; Mahurin-Smith et al., 2021), qualitative (Hamilton & DeThorne, 2021), and mixed methods (Mills et al., 2021). These articles will help readers identify ways in which AAE affects how teachers view its speakers’ language skills and communicative practices and relates to its speakers’ literacy outcomes. Conclusion: The goal of the forum is to make a lasting contribution to the discipline with a concentrated focus on how to assess and address communicative variation in the U.S. classroom.Item Perceptions of Black Children’s Narrative Language: A Mixed-Methods Study(Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 2021-01) Mills, Monique; Moore, Leslie C.; Chang, Rong; Kim, Somin; Frick, BethanyPurpose: In this mixed-methods study, we address two aims. First, we examine the impact of language variation on the ratings of children’s narrative language. Secondly, we identify participants’ ideologies related to narrative language and language variation. Method: 40 adults listened to and rated six Black second-grade children on the quality of 12 narratives (six fictional, six personal). Adults then completed a quantitative survey and participated in a qualitative interview. Results: Findings indicated that adults rated students with less variation from mainstream American English (MAE) more highly than students with greater variation from MAE for fictional narratives but not for personal narratives. Personal narratives tended to be evaluated more favorably by parents than teachers. Black raters tended to assign higher ratings of narrative quality than did White raters. Thematic analysis and conversation analysis of qualitative interviews supported quantitative findings and provided pertinent information about participants’ beliefs. Conclusion: Taken together, quantitative and qualitative results point to a shared language ideology among adult raters of variation from MAE being more acceptable in informal contexts, such as telling a story of personal experience, and less acceptable in more formal contexts, such as narrating a fictional story prompted by a picture sequence.Item Rare Vocabulary Production in School-age Narrators from Low-income Communities(2021-01) Mahurin-Smith, Jamie; Mills, Monique; Chang, RongPurpose: This study was designed to assess the utility of a tool for automated analysis of rare vocabulary use in the spoken narratives of a group of school-age children from low-income communities. Method: We evaluated personal and fictional narratives from 76 school-age children from lowincome communities (mean age = 9;3). We analyzed children's use of rare vocabulary in their narratives, with the goal of evaluating relationships among rare vocabulary use, performance on standardized language tests, language sample measures, sex, and use of African American English (AAE). Results: Use of rare vocabulary in school-age children is robustly correlated with established language sample measures. Male sex was also significantly associated with more frequent rare vocabulary use. There was no association between rare vocabulary use and use of AAE. Discussion: Evaluation of rare vocabulary use in school-age children may be a culturally fair assessment strategy that aligns well with existing language sample measures.