I hear the whispers: “My students are totally illiterate.”

In back alleys: “If I hear ‘you know’ or ‘like’ out of their mouths one more time….”

In muted tones: “The email said ‘culd u plz send 2days homwork.’ It makes my blood boil!”

As educators, it’s our job to recognize our students’ academic weaknesses and work toward their improvement. Furthermore, the ability to communicate clearly and effectively in Standard English is arguably the most important skill to be gleaned from an undergraduate education. So a certain degree of frustration with our students’ English is to be expected. But there are good ways to approach the challenge, and there are inappropriate and inefficacious ways. We should strive to avoid stigmatizing the ways our students speak and write. We should not draw unwarranted connections between our students’ fluency in Standard English and their level of intelligence. And we should teach our students to appreciate the power of language and rhetoric, so that they can harness their linguistic creativity to their benefit.

The first step is to establish a little empathy for our students. The kind of English we want them to speak, so-called “Standard English,” is a rough amalgam of a variety of grammatical and lexical features. Depending on how you delineate it, Standard English is the native dialect of very few English speakers, and perhaps of none at all. I, for instance, grew up in the Midwest, and, upon moving away, I quickly learned (through the ridicule of my pitiless friends) that what I knew as a “bubbler” was properly called a “drinking fountain” and that the lilt of my Wisconsin dipthongs made me sound like a Canadian. Like nearly all other educated people, my ability to use Standard English is very much an acquired one. The native dialects of Queens College students, who have by and large been raised in an urban environment characterized by extreme linguistic diversity, are still further removed from Standard English. Thus we should not be shocked and aghast when Queens College undergraduates lack the Standard English vocabulary and syntax that we ourselves have honed only through many years of education and practice.

Moreover, it’s crucial to remember that Standard English is only “standard” by convention. Just as, for example, French enjoys no greater depth of expressivity than Spanish, there is nothing that makes Standard English inherently better suited to academic discourse than the varieties of English that our students speak. The standard’s only advantage is that there is an established convention to use it in particular settings, thereby establishing a common mode of communication between thinkers. Yet a lack of facility in Standard English by itself says nothing about the intelligence of the speaker, and we would be amiss to let such a thought creep into our judgment of student work.

One might argue that the problem of youth literacy is deepened by modern forms of communication like email and text messaging, where initialisms, abbreviations, and various orthographic funny business preponderate. It is of course hard to deny that thumbing out a message on the keypad of a cell phone is likely to encourage typographical shortcuts, and it might very well be the case that an increasing majority of the English prose that our students read and write is of this less-than-Standard variety. Thus, the argument goes, students can’t help but to let their linguistic laxity creep into the classroom: It’s a result of our modern age.

Let’s assume this argument is sound: Young people are becoming less and less able to conform to the conventions of Standard English because of their overwhelming exposure to non-standard usage. A pessimistic educator might toll the bell for traditional literacy. But is all hope really lost? One could instead argue that students are incredibly enthusiastic about new media. On MySpace and Facebook, students are producing and consuming huge amounts of prose on their own, without the inducement of Writing-Intensive syllabi or English 110 requirements. Through these media, our students are developing an organic sense of authorship, an awareness of audience and tone that, without the Internet, probably would not have taken root. Of course, this sense of authorship is rough around the edges, far from what we expect of sophisticated writers. Yet it is far easier to teach the details of Standard English to someone who is interested and engaged than to someone who isn’t, and we have new technologies to thank for the seed of this engagement.

These observations suggest several strategies for teaching our students the mores of Standard English. By implementing new and evolving technologies in our courses—the very technologies for which students have an already-existing affinity—we can harness that enthusiasm and get them to care about the writing they produce. What’s more, the interactive, collaborative and public nature of technologies like blogs and wikis is ideal for getting students to think about whom they’re writing for and what purpose they’re trying to accomplish. The one-way dialogue of traditional essay writing, on the other hand, does not so explicitly encourage awareness of audience and motive. With their attention drawn to the essentially interactive nature of writing, students will have a practical motivation for mastering the rhetorical devices that Standard English provides.

Another, more general teaching strategy involves practice, and lots of it. The pessimist argues that the student is so inundated with bad English that their bad habits get deeply ingrained. If this is true, then exposure to a huge amount of reading and writing—with a focus on “good” English—has the potential to dislodge these habits. Provide samples of student writing that you’d like them to emulate, both in content and in style. Assign low-stakes writing assignments, like journals, so that students get used to the process of putting their thoughts on paper. Those explicit lessons that you give about the finer points of grammar and punctuation will be reinforced both by seeing the rule being followed in sample texts and by practicing the rules themselves.

Above all, be patient. The conventions of Standard English put Robert’s Rules of Order to shame for their complexity and sheer number, and they take many years and much practice to master. Angry whispers to your colleagues about the decline of literacy are less likely to excite change than prudent pedagogical practice.