It seems that a dialect is just an unofficial or "off grid" system of language. A dialect cannot be "wrong" if there is a group of people who all understand this system of language and can communicate with each other in this system. That is the purpose of language, to communicate. Some dialects are easier to understand if you are outside that dialect, so those might seem "less wrong." Some dialects are very difficult to understand to an outsider, so those might be interpreted as "more wrong," but that doesn't hold water if the people within the dialect all understand each other. So the prejudice against dialects to me is just a misunderstanding of how language lives in communities is that can unfortunately feed into biases and prejudices.

My emotional language is Latvian (I automatically speak to babies and pets in Latvian), because that was the language my mother spoke to me. My intellectual language is English, because that is the language in which I received my higher education.

I see some of the difficulties in native "General English" speakers as well. Practices that help dense dialect users and emerging bilingual students would help all students across the board.

I agree that reading text improves language because you are reading a "model text" and getting an opportunity to experience saying linguistic structures out loud so that they can become internalized and students can then eventually reproduce them in writing and understand them when reading them.

I would never approach it this way. I would never teach the spelling of ask based on a child having just said "aks" in the classroom. There is no way that doesn't come across as a correction. I would only discuss this difference in pronunciation while I was teaching "ask" in spelling, taking time to discuss that when we read it or speak it, it may sound like "aks." A few of my reading students read "ask" as "aks" consistently, but I don't correct them as I would if the read "bad" instead of "dad" or "sell" instead of "shell." The former is their dialect and the latter are decoding errors.

Yes! When we teach a foreign language, we are not trying to replace any other language. So if we teach General English to someone with dialect density as explicitly as we teach a foreign language, that approach should have a positive effect. We are adding something new, not trying to change or fix the existing language.

I notice dropped plurals and past tense also with my Spanish-speaking students and this idea that greater cognitive load could change their oral reading to reflect their home language patterns makes sense. They may be understanding the text perfectly but what is coming out of their mouth is not matching the morphology on the page.

In my own language (Latvian) I have family members from parts of Latvia who do similar things in their spoken language regarding plural endings and past tense as African-American dialects. They make "mistakes" that digress from General Latvian all over the place. It speaks to the different pockets of culture diversity within my culture, and I appreciate that. I know Latvians who can code switch from those dialects into General Latvian. So I understand how this all works and feel I can relate my experience to other dialect systems in other languages. However, I struggle with whether or not my students understand that I respect their home language system. I am not African-American, so do I come across as a white outsider, correcting them because I think they are wrong and need to be fixed?, as opposed to a randomly-assigned teacher who holds no opinion or judgment about their home language and is just there to teach them General English without trying to disturb or diminish their home language system? I wonder about this.

I witness that code switching in my kids. When some of them leave the classroom, their language patterns and intonation change. It is very interesting and cool to me that they know which "language" is expected and appropriate in which setting.

I think about this often and when I teach sounds we fortunately use dication as the way to teach sounds, so I can always enunciate a word "for spelling purposes" which does not take away from the way the word sounds when spoken. I often say, this is how we pronounce it in class so we know how to spell it, but if we are talking with our friends, it sounds different."

I agree completely!!