It was this same interference that got Carlos into trouble. He said beach but was punished for saying bitch. Although born in the United States, this 4th-grader still heard and said the 14 vowel sounds of English as the 5 vowel sounds of Spanish (Avery & Ehrlich, 1992). As part of the language learning process, ELLs hear and say all English sounds through “the filter…of the native language” (p. xv). If not helped, they assume the survival strategy of avoiding problem words. Rather than risk being punished again, Carlos simply skipped the word beach when reading aloud on his next DIBELS test. He preferred losing a point on his test score, even though the instructions indicated that “the student is not penalized for imperfect pronunciation due to dialect, articulation, or second language inferences [sic: interferences]” (Good & Kaminski,2002, pp. 27-28).