Reading research continues to identify phonemic awareness and knowledge of the alphabetic principle as key factors in the literacy acquisition process and to indicate that they greatly facilitate decoding efforts. While research indicates that phonemic awareness and alphabetic knowledge are necessary to literacy acquisition, many early childhood educators express concern about the instructional strategies used to address learning in this area. Reading experts have tended to emphasize the learning of skills, while early childhood specialists have tended to emphasize instructional strategies over content. The qualitative study described in this paper attempted to integrate the differing perspectives of reading specialists and early childhood specialists by exploring the role that language, specifically dialogue, plays as an instructional strategy specifically focused on phonemic and alphabetic knowledge in a pre-kindergarten classroom. Data were the dialogues between teacher and 4- and 5-year-olds screened for phonemic awareness and alphabetic behaviors. The findings of the study are discussed through the examination of three students whose approach to literacy was each very different. The dialogue data indicate that the greatest amount of dialogue occurred when cognitive dissonance was present or when functions entered the child's zone of proximal development. It was concluded that effective instruction requires teacher focus, reflection, and intersubjectivity--willingness to allow the childrens context to permeate the classroom context--and that an effective means of accomplishing this goal is through the use of dialogue. (Author/HTH)