At present, there is virtually no empirical evidence of the success of educational techniques designed to minimize the interference of black English on the acquisition of reading skills. The 180 black, inner-city third and fifth graders who participated in this study were selected in order to determine whether the discrepancy between performance on reading tasks, presented in standard English, black English standard orthography, and black English nonstandard orthography, varies with grade level. Subjects were administered equivalent listening comprehension, oral reading, and oral reading comprehension tasks in standard English and black English. An analysis of data suggests that, while there is no significant difference between the correlations between scores for standard and black English forms of the listening comprehension tasks at either grade level, correlations between scores for standard English, black English standard orthography, and black English nonstandard orthography forms of the oral reading and oral reading comprehension tasks were significantly higher at the fifth-grade level than at the third-grade level. (KS)