“…many saw the academic voice as the exclusively legitimate, if inaccessible mode of social discourse… By segregating the academic voice from students own voices, public school do not only linguistic violence…”

As a language teacher the idea of silencing is particularly relevant and ironic.  The very purpose of language learning is based upon communication and expression in one language or another.  In our sociolinguistics course last year, we learned that each person often speaks various dialects of the same language: the home dialect, the work dialect, and the academic dialect (which is mentioned within the article) amongst others.  We learned that all dialects are valid, because language is a working, alive mechanism, owned only by those that are implementing it in a given moment.   What happens when the dialects become so different that the differing parties no longer understand each other?  Are we speaking different languages?   We learned that most people favor dialects similar to their own.  Do we teach people to speak in a dialect so that all can be understood or do we as educators work to understand the variations and merely accept them as part of the culture that a student embodies?  Are we doing our students a disservice by not teaching them the academic dialect?  Or is it more important to preserve and appreciate their individual linguistic backgrounds?