ABSTRACT
This chapter examines language variation in the context of those African-American children who are struggling to read. The first section speaks to language variation within the changing standards for academic success in American classrooms. Next, struggling readers who are African American are approached through a social dialect framework. The challenges that dialect variation present are discussed and then examined in the context of studies conducted over the past 27 years on the development of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) and possible linguistic markers
of a spoken language impairment. In the final section, some promising avenues are offered for considering possible relationships among the nature of phonological representations, dialect variation, and instructional practices that may be responsive to the language variation needs of struggling readers with and without a spoken language impairment.
