Today's inclusion of semantics within the overall language design offers proof against the earlier mistaken view that semantics was irrelevant to the study of language. Sociolinguistics have reassessed language as a social matrix that encompasses the sum of linguistic variation present in a given community. Variability in language is described by sociolinguistic rules which specify the grammatical options a speaker may actually select, given a number of conditions. Common to these formulations is the notion of constraints--factors that may or may not prevent a speaker from making a certain linguistic decision. Sociolinguistics has a far reaching consequence for English instruction in our schools, bringing to our attention the idea of a cultural-linguistic continuum. No longer can the teacher's goal be that all children should speak alike. New educational goals should be subsumed under one main objective: the acquisition of communicative competence. Teachers must have the ability to assess unemotionally the nature of speech varieties that children bring to school and to recognize the value of code shifting within everyday speech events. (HOD)