Teaching language variety

The Multiliteracies movement has stressed the importance of students learning to negotiate such differences as among ‘regional, ethnic, or class-based dialects’ and even ‘the code-switching often to be found within a text among different languages, dialects, or registers’ (New London Group 1996). The position that language learners should become familiar with such a range of varieties is not entirely new, but its bases and implications have rarely been explored at length, and even the recent book length treatment of Multiliteracies (Cope & Kalantzis 2000) says little more about the matter. The present paper reviews literature relevant to this issue to evaluate the basis for this proposal and to explore its potential impact on language teaching in the twenty-first century. In particular it will consider: • to what extent and for what reasons it is important for language learners to become familiar with different dialects and, in some situations, even distinct languages; • how the teaching of language variety can be approached in practice; and • how this issue relates to issues in the roles of language teachers, native versus non-native teachers, and computer assisted language learning.