The purpose of this eight week study was to provide explicit instruction to improve spelling to 124 sixth grade students who are speakers of African American English (AAE). Two classroom teachers taught 14 different language arts class sections. The research design was a pretest/posttest/posttest design using wait-list-control. The treatment group consisted of seven classes, and the comparison group consisted of seven classes. After the first implementation of the intervention, the comparison group received the intervention. The results from the criterion-referenced spelling assessments showed that students who received explicit, systematic instruction, made gains in their spelling performance from pretest to posttest and in the follow-up posttest. Further, participants maintained the gains in spelling even after eight weeks.