How to Teach Middle School Students the Concept of Dialect

As a middle school literature teacher, I am often confronted with students who have difficulty understanding a passage or an entire story due to the language used. To help them better understand dialect, I use this lesson.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Langston Hughes' "A Negro Speaks of Rivers" poem
• Any one of Langston Hughes' "blues" poems

1. Develop a list of questions for EACH poem and a list of questions for both poems.

2. Explain to the students that dialect is simply words written the way they would be spoken by that particular character(s).

3. Read the first poem, "A Negro Speaks of Rivers," aloud to the class as they follow along on their own copies. Ask the questions developed for that poem.

4. Read the second poem, whichever one of Hughes' blues poems you chose, aloud to the class as they follow along on their copies. Ask the questions developed for that poem. the questions should be the same or very similar to the questions for the first poem.

5. Ask the class the questions developed for both poems. These questions should be comparison/contrast questions. One question needs to be, "Could these (or were these) poems have been written by the same person?"

Tips & Warnings

• Make sure the author's name is cut from the student handouts or at least covered up so they won't know who wrote the poems.
• The questions for each individual poem should ask about who the speaker is, where the speaker might be from and what educational background the speaker seems to have.
• The students will most likely doubt that the poems were written by the same person due to the dialect of the second poem.