ABSTRACT
Many children grow up in communities where the language of the home and the immediate community is a non-standard dialect of English or an English-based Creole, some of whose grammatical, lexical and sound features differ from their equivalents in Standard English. Schools and teachers have a responsibility to respect the language of a pupil's community and culture, whatever it is. In the past, some teachers have seen it as their responsibility to encourage or even force children to speak in the dialect associated with success as they, the teachers, perceive it, and as other powerful forces are said to perceive it. However, today's teachers still face a dilemma: they wish to respect the language of their pupils' communities and cultures; they acknowledge that Standard English, in its spoken as well as its written form, has a currency unlike that of any other variety of the language in many social contexts for which they are supposed to be preparing their pupils.
