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Research has shown that early intervention can help change a student's trajectory, helping them become more successful in school and decreasing the likelihood that they will leave school before receiving their high school diploma. Because African-American students fare worse than their peers on early reading assessments, they are the focus of this research. While there has been much research on reading interventions, and a smaller subset of research on technological reading interventions, there has been little to no research that combines technology and culture to create reading interventions for African-American students. This research explores the design, implementation and evaluation of a culturally relevant reading tutor called SightWord Pal that focuses on sight word recognition in order to improve student word recognition accuracy and speed, key components of fluent oral reading and overall reading proficiency. Investigations into the system's usability suggest that students are able to use the system to complete activity related tasks although results from a modified version of the System Usability Scale suggests that they did not find the system usable. These results suggest that the System Usability Scale may not be an appropriate assessment tool for this particular demographic. An evaluation of SightWord Pal's impact on word recognition accuracy, word recognition speed, reader self-perception, and reading opinions showed significant improvement in words recognition accuracy for students who used the system but statistically insignificant differences when compared to students who did and did not use the system. Those who used the system believed they were learning, learned on average five more words than their peers, enjoyed using the system, and wished to continue using the system for practicing sight words. While this study was being conducted, 11,524 recordings of African-American children's speech were captured and stored. This collection of audio represents the first corpus of African-American children's speech and has been given the name UF CoPAACS (University of Florida Corpus of Prompted African-American Children's Speech). The UF CoPAACS contains audio of students saying words, letters, answering questions and providing synopses of stories that they heard being read. This corpus can be used by researchers to train automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems for children's speech, evaluate existing ASR systems, or study the speech characteristics of African-American children who are in the second grade. The contributions of this research include the SightWord Pal system, UF CoPAACS, findings questioning the appropriateness of the System Usability Scale for young African-American children, and guidelines and suggestions for the design of new learning systems, integration of technology into classrooms, and studies of learning technologies based on feedback from the participants of this research.