This study investigated home-school communication patterns between special reading teachers and parents of the children they served, with attention to teachers' and parents' views of each other as literacy supporters of children. The paper discusses the acquisition of literacy by children, formally at school and informally at home, as well as various social and cultural influences on literacy education, especially in Appalachia. Studies show that schools, particularly urban schools, often fail to recognize Appalachian culture and thus fail to serve the Appalachian child. Parent-teacher communication often is hindered by boundary-setting and territoriality in which the power balance traditionally is tipped toward the teacher. The research population was 13 Columbus, Ohio, urban Black and Appalachian parents of first-graders from poor and working-class economic backgrounds. The children were participating in the Reading Recovery Program, an early intervention tutoring program for first graders at risk of failure. Two styles of communication, active and passive, evolved among the seven teachers in the study. Active teachers tended to pursue parents relentlessly in order to get them involved with their children's education. Passive teachers used formal, less personal communication. Active teachers created three-way collaborative learning experiences, involving both parents and children in the education process. At conferences, parents discussed the home literacy context, while teachers discussed the formal school context. The paper concludes that active teachers were far more successful than passive teachers in obtaining parent participation and recommends that students take a bigger role in parent-teacher conferences and that the family-school relationship be a triangular one. Twenty-two references, four tables. (TES)