Education for Literacy: Learning About Standard Codes Versus Learning How to Use Them Multicultural Literacies: Dialect, Discourse, and Diversity

The need to value children's voices and narratives, and not to stifle their language development by overemphasizing the teaching of formal grammar, has been recognized in English teaching circles for at least the past 30 years. An irresolvable dilemma for English teachers persists. How can they both value students' narratives written in forms reflecting non-standard varieties of English and, at the same time, help students develop the ability to enter workplaces that depend on more standardized codes? There seem to be only a limited number of logical exits from such a dilemma: either children do have to learn these specialized codes (the codes, for example, of medicine, law, and scientific research), or the codes have to be changed in ways that make them converge with other