ABSTRACT
Because language plays such a central role in teaching and learning, educators often want to know more about the language patterns of the community from which their students come. Unfortunately, there are few resources that make careful descriptions of dialects accessible to those not specializing in linguistics, and the resources that exist do not fully apply to every community within a broader dialect group. But teachers and practitioners have direct access to dialect data. They can learn about the local dialect norms by looking in detail at the actual speech of their students in the classroom, in the hallways, and on the playground.
