This book provides a collection of interrelated essays on language for teachers concerned with first and second language acquisition, non-standard English, the teaching of grammar, language change, and the attainment of literacy. A problem-oriented text, the book presents the various controversies surrounding each language area, offering competing disciplinary perspectives. Incorporating only the linguistic theory that has immediate classroom applicability, the book consolidates research, offers a nontechnical approach, and invites teachers to question common assumptions and practices concerning language. Essays in the book are "The Acquisition of Language" (Breyne Arlene Moskowitz); "Creole Languages" (Derek Bickerton); "Making It Last: Repetition in Children's Discourse" (Elinor Ochs Keenan); "Context, Meaning and Strategy in Parent-Child Conversation" (Peter French and Bencie Woll); "The Significance of Learners' Errors" (S. P. Corder); "Bilingual Education and Second Language Acquisition Theory" (Stephen D. Krashen); "A Chinese Child's Acquisition of English" (Joseph Huang and Evelyn Hatch); "Underachievement among Minority Students" (Jim Cummins); "The Cognitive Academic Language Learning Approach" (Anna Uhl Chamot and J. Michael O'Malley); "English in Our Language Heritage" (Shirley Brice Heath); "Educational Rights of Language Minorities" (Sau-ling Cynthia Wong); "A Look at Process in Child Second-Language Acquisition" (Evelyn Hatch and others); "Individual Differences in Second Language Acquisition" (Lily Wong Fillmore); "ESL Children as Teachers: A Social View of Second Language Use" (Donna Johnson); "Language Change in the History of English: Implications for Teachers" (George Gadda); "The King Case: Implications for Educators" (Jerrie Cobb Scott); "The Logic of Nonstandard English" (William Labov); "'The Forms of Things Unknown': Black Modes of Discourse" (Geneva Smitherman); "Approaches to Grammar" (Erika Lindemann); "What Petey Forgot" (Doris T. Myers); "Alternatives to Teaching Formal, Analytical Grammar" (Ellery Sedgwick); "A Generative Rhetoric of the Sentence" (Francis Christensen); "Grammar in Context: Why and How" (Jim Meyer and others); "The Sense of Story" (Gordon Wells); "Learning to Read by Reading and Making Sense of Reading--And of Reading Instruction" (Frank Smith); "Watching Young Writers" (Glenda L. Bissex);"Learning to Think through Writing" (Lucy McCormick Calkins); and "Kan Yu Ret and Rayt en Ingles: Children Become Literate in English as a Second Language" (Sarah Hudelson). (RS)