The teacher must recognize the legitimacy of the dialect speaker's language by insuring that beginning reading materials accurately reflect the language and experience of the child. Each child should dictate and then read his own language. (Author)

Goodman's hypothesis, that the task of learning to read is made more difficult as the divergence between the dialect of the learner and that of the material increases, raises three questions considered by the author to be central to the dialect/reading issue. The first asks what influence dialect has on acquiring reading ability; the second asks…