One of the central problems in teaching dialectally divergent students to read is the teacher's own lack of awareness of the nature of dialects. Teachers with some linguistics background will be more sensitive to language variation, and will therefore be better able to recognize divergent dialects and to separate learning problems relating to dialect differences from those relating to intelligence, emotional adjustment, and other factors. The method best suited to both the linguistic and social realities of teaching dialectally diverse students to read is the "gentle guidance" approach, which separates the central concern of learning to read from the tangential goal of learning the standard dialect. In this method, students work in their own dialect, and the teacher resolves any confusion or questions as they arise, with straightforward and nonjudgmental linguistics-based explanations. This lets the whole class learn about dialect diversity as well as the reading process. A four-page bibliography is appended. (HOD)