Don McAndrew and Mark Hurlbert won "article of the year"
award for their article "Teaching Intentional Errors in Standard
English: A Way to "big smart english" (English Leadership Quarterly,
May 1993--contact NCTE for back issues). In this article, M & H
advocate broadening what is accepted in the classroom as a way of
getting minority kids interested in reading and writing. They
suggest discussing dialect differences that constitute "errors"
in SE as political as well as language issues.
        Obviously, the traditional approach in which students speaking
a dialect distant from SE are told that their language is no good,
in which they are commened to learn SE without being given a way to
do so, in which they are criticized constantly for making mistakes
in a "grammar" they don't understand and that cannot be taught
directly (even to middle class white kids)--and so on (forgive the
bad syntax here; my editor won't let me go back and fix things).
        Whatever one does in these cases, it cannot be worse than
what is being done in the traditional classroom. I don't like the
idea of makeing  dialect differences "official," but if using a
concept like "ebonics" can release students from frustration and lead
them to try out reading and writing, I would support it.
        Eventually, regardless of what dialect you start writing in,
after awhile, after years of reading and writing, your style of
talking and writing will gravitate toward the dialect of the written
models you immerse yourself in. If you read a lot of SE, you'll pick it
up. Isn't that the goal? Does it matter how students get there?
        --Bill Murdick qks