The wide gap that exists between linguists and English teachers accounts for some of the difficulty involved in determining whether or not students "have a right to their own language." Linguists generally concern themselves with cognitive sufficiency; whereas, English teachers, concerned with behavioral sufficiency, encounter language…

The application of sociolinguistic principles should be the concern of every professional person who has any control over what goes on inside a classroom, particularly the teacher, who has the most regular, if not the closest contact with the student. It sometimes seems, however, that in their approach to multidialects in the classroom, teachers…