Sociolinguists have been fighting dialect prejudice since the 1960s, but deficit views of non-standard English are regaining currency in educational discourse. In this paper I argue that the traditional sociolinguistic response -stressing dialect systematicity and tolerance of 'difference' -may no longer be effective by questioning a key assumption that both deficit and difference approaches share, namely that there exist discrete varieties of English. Based on an empirical study of the language of working-class children in north-east England, I demonstrate that non-standard dialects of English do not have a discrete system of grammar that is isolated from other varieties; rather local dialect forms interact with a range of semiotic resources (including standard forms) within speakers' repertoires. Interactional analyses of the children's spontaneous speech highlight this hybridity, as well as the social meanings behind the linguistic choices children make. I conclude by addressing educational responses to non-standard dialect in the classroom, suggesting that it is not the presence or absence of non-standard forms in children's speech that raises educational issues; rather, educational responses which problematise non-standard voices risk marginalising working-class speech, and may contribute to the alienation of workingclass children, or significant groups of them, within the school system. 2

Teachers are increasingly called on to use dialogic teaching practices to engage active pupil participation in academically challenging classroom discourse. Such practices are in tension with commonly held beliefs about pupil ability as fixed and/or context independent. Moreover, teaching practices that seek to make pupil thinking visible can also make perceived pupil “inarticulateness” and/or “low ability” visible, with important implications for pupil identities. This article explores how teachers in a dialogic teaching intervention managed the participation and identities of “low ability” pupils. We use linguistic ethnographic methods to analyze three different case studies in which teachers seek to include underachieving pupils’ voices in the discussion and discuss implications for dialogic pedagogy and the study of classroom social identification processes.

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