This paper discusses the need for foreign language students to develop positive attitudes about regional and social dialect variation, while learning dialectal patterns that will best facilitate their widest acceptance into a community of target language speakers. The latter issue was tested in a study in which native speakers of American English rated voices according to personality traits. Two of the four diagnostic voices were native speakers of American English, one with no pronounced regional or class grammatical markers, the other with strong east-Texas pronunciation and accompanying grammatical markers. Two other voices were both native speakers of Jordanian Arabic, one devoid of American English regional markers and the other having them. By far the greatest number of negative evaluations went to the Jordanian Arabic speaker who used many American English regionalisms. In order to develop linguistically defensible attitudes in their students, language teachers must be familiar with regional markers. Methods to develop sensitivity to language variation include using novels and other popular reading materials, having the students bring their own examples, and having students paraphrase examples as an exercise in style-shifting. (Author/CLK)