Dialect Training and Reading: A Further Look

PRESENTS RESULTS from a dialect training project conducted in a rural Georgia Negro school. Several reading experts have written that the dialect spoken by many Negro children may interfere with the acquisition of decoding skills. In order to conform or reject this position two determinations must be made: the extent to which these children can be taught to speak an approximation of standard white speech; the effects of that dialect training upon reading achievement. All four first grades at the school where the research was conducted were divided in such a way that interactive effects could be identified. Two groups were given dialect training while the control groups received a language placebo. In order to examine effects between phoneme-grapheme controlled readers and dialect training the four classes were also divided into two groups taught to read using basal series and two groups which used a linguistic series. At the conclusion of the treatment period no significant results between groups were obtained which would confirm the assumption that dialect has a causative effect upon reading achievement.