Christine, I'm about as liberal as you can get in regard to respecting students' own language (see the NCTE statement on student's language). If chatting with a student in my office, I would never correct her, even if her dialect tossed up something so removed from SE as "had went." If you start stopping a person in mid-sentence to correct their grammar, they're going to stop talking to you--and rightfully so! Suppose for example, you started criticizing me for using "singular THEY" on e-mail posts--I'd stop responding to your queries! On drafts of essays written for college courses I teach, I put a squiggly line under incomprehensible, awkward, or ungrammatical (relative to SE) phrasing, which means: "Rephrase." If I found that a student didn't know how to change "had went" to "had gone," I would show her. --Bill Murdick