On this basis alone we might ask if something could be done at school to
remove the possibility of children becoming uncommunicative in the classroom
- children who are clearly not at all so in the playground, or at home. It
is evident that a minimum requirement here is for teachers, and the school
system generally, to be tolerant (and not begrudgingly so) of dialectal
variation, and not to brand it as anything inferior. Given current social
psychological and linguistic data, we can now provide teachers with the
evidence that this, in fact, is the most reasonable thing to do. Dialects and
accents are possessions one shares with those who are psychologically
similar (see Bishop, 1979; Delia, 1972; Sebastian, Ryand and Corso, in
press) and with whom one identifies. They are, as we outlined in the previous section, clearly linked to a child's conception of group membership
and self-respect. Children will therefore not wish to converge towards
another speech variety unless they want to alter their identity in some way.