In my first post I said: I think we should be teaching all the current dialects of English that we can. I'll ammend that statement to say that teaching what dialect is and being aware of its intrinsic value as its words hold specific meaning (as you suggest) would be more in line with my intent. However, the person that comes to school and is told that the other 90% of their linguistic life is "without quality" is getting quite a different education than your goddaughter who is has the ability to fake it, and I think it makes a bit more sense to teach "Northamptonshire" to a class of 75% Northamptonshire-ites than it does to teach the whole class "RP".I'm guessing this is the Brit equivalent to SE pronouciation.

I agree that actually teaching the skills to adjust one's language and speech to eloquently manifest a specific "foreign" dialect is damn close to a waste of time (almost as wasteful as teaching SE sometimes), yet certainly not to someone who has "the gift of song".