Does children's dialect awareness support later reading and spelling in the standard language form?

Dialect users have considerable difficulty with learning literacy in the standard form of the language for a variety of reasons. One aspect of their difficulty relates to phonological differences between the standard and the vernacular form: for example, Arabic dialect users' performance in phonological awareness tasks is lower when the phonemes exist in the standard but do not exist in the vernacular form (Saiegh-Haddad, Levin, Hende, and Ziv, 2011). Sentence comprehension is also affected by dialect use, presumably with consequences for reading comprehension: by the age of five users of Standard American English (SAE) can rely on the final "s" for third person present to determine whether an event is generic or past whereas African American Dialect (AAD) users cannot do so by the age of seven (De Villiers and Johnson, 2007). Education policies to address this linguistic issue have resulted in heated debates (see, for example, Rickford, 1999). Divergent approaches have included, at one extreme, the proposition that dialect users should be allowed to write as they speak, whereas at the other extreme there were suggestions of teaching children to speak, for example "good French", so that they could write correctly. Less radical approaches have involved the systematic exposure of pre-school children to story book reading (Feitelson, Goldstein, Iraqi, and Share, 1993), because vernacular forms are not written and story books are written in the standard form. In this paper, we consider a novel alternative, which is to promote the development of dialect awareness in the learners. Dialect awareness is the appreciation of the systematic differences between the standard and the vernacular form of a language (Wolfram, 1999). This term has been used in the literature in the discussion of preparing teachers for working in schools where a dialect rather than the standard form of the language is used, but it can readily be applied also to the learners who are users of a dialect. Our hypothesis is that, the more aware a dialect user is of the systematic differences between the standard language and the vernacular, the easier it will be for him/her to connect the vernacular form with the standard written form.