The purpose of this essay is to suggest one area of study, the functional nature of social dialects, and certain principles of anthropology as they are applied to social and cultural change, which may prove of some use to the teacher. There are essentially three pragmatic functions of language in communicative interaction: manipulative, expressive, and informative. Recently, ethno-linguists have pointed out that there is structure and pattern in the way a language functions in its matrix culture. The rich variety of language styles recognized by the Black community has been noted by several educators and socio-linguistic researchers. This information can prove invaluable to a teacher in a second dialect program. Perhaps the most important criterion for the teacher who is committed to bringing about social change in the most effective way is an awareness of the centrality of language to the sociocultural context in which he is operating. He has the responsibility to add to his fund of knowledge concerning the functional nature of social dialects and the methods of effective agents of change. (CK)