The purposes of this study were to analyze the pronunciation of pupils and teachers to determine the deviation from the expected pronunciation for each group, and to determine the influence of dialect on reading performance of pupils. A random sample of 20 first grade pupils and 20 elementary teachers from four small, rural, all-white elementary schools in Sevier County, Tennessee, were interviewed with the use of an instrument which the investigator developed from an arbitrary selection of 162 pictoral words. These words were teaching examples for the 18 vowels and diphthongs that are taught as phoneme-grapheme correspondences in three leading basal reading programs. Each interview was conducted individually and taped on a reel-to-reel tape recorder. An informant had only to look at a picture and say what it was. Any deviation from the expected pronunciation was counted as a "divergence." The results indicated that neither the pupils nor the teachers pronounced the teaching examples according to the expected pronunciation. A lack of significant correlation between pupils' pronunciation and reading achievement scores was taken to indicate that dialect differences in their phonological aspect are not related to reading performance. (Author/MKM)