My method was simple. I chose four students and had each of them take sections of the test, asking them questions as they did so, encouraging them to talk as they tried to figure out an item. The first thing that emerged was the complete foreignness of the task. A sample item in the prefixes and roots section (called Word Parts) presented the word “unhappy,” and asked the test taker to select one of four other words “which gives the meaning of the underlined part of the first word.” The choices were very, glad, sad, not. Though the person giving the test had read through the instructions with the class, many still could not understand, and if they chose an answer at all, most likely chose sad, a synonym for the whole word unhappy. Nowhere in their daily reading are these students required to focus on parts of words in this way. The multiple-choice format is also unfamiliar—it is not part of day-to-day literacy—so the task as well as the format is new, odd. I explained the directions again—read them slowly, emphasized the sample item—but still, three of the four students continued to fall into the test maker’s trap of choosing synonyms for the target word rather than zeroing in on the part of the word in question. Such behavior is common among those who fail in our schools, and it has led some commentators to posit that students like these are cognitively and linguistically deficient in some fundamental way: They process language differently, or reason differently from those who succeed in school, or the dialect they speak in some basic way interferes with their processing of Standard Written English.