To examine some of the linguistic aspects of Chicano English (a variety of English commonly spoken by Mexican American bilinguals in the Southwest) which present problems in the acquisition of written Standard English, sample writings were collected from 15 University of Texas-El Paso students enrolled in an English as a Second Language course. To obtain an adequate sample of natural and reading pronunciation in English, ethnographic interviews with students who reflected monolingual English speaking residential patterns during their first six years were recorded along with the reading aloud of compositions previously written by the students. The phonological aspects of Chicano English in the El Paso, Texas, community were also observed and documented for three years. The writing samples demonstrated problems in literacy development in the following areas: orthography; phonological confusion (devoicing, defricativization, consonant cluster deletion, lexing of vowels, loss of "wh" versus "w" distinction, and other pronunciations; and non-standard varieties, embedded question inversion, and consonant deletion of indefinite article). Results indicated that the difficulty in the writing system of English was due to dialect background among bilinguals, to lack of familiarity with the English writing system, and to contact with Spanish (manifested in interference). (CM)