Cultural Group,Reading Attainments and Dialect Interference

(NB. In the interests of brevity, the British-born children of parents of West Indian origin are referred to as the WI group and the children of parents of English origin are referred to as the E group.) It has been suggested that, partly because of dialect interferences, WI children experience greater difficulty than E group children in various aspects of reading. The present study compares the attainments of a sample of 20 WI and E boys and girls of equivalent intellectual ability attending a multi-cultural inner-city comprehensive school in a social priority area. Reading accuracy, reading comprehension and listening comprehension attainments of the children were tested by the individual administration of the Neale Analysis of Reading Ability, Forms A, B and C. In terms of both reading accuracy and comprehension, although the group mean scores were all below the norms for their chronological ages, there were no significant mean differences between the WI and E pupils or between boys and girls. Silent reading led to significantly lower scores than did reading aloud.