In language instruction, a dependable informational base of fact, experience, or judgment is essential if students are to develop a functional literacy. Yet the language information base in use today--the set of concepts about what language is, how it works, and how individual languages are maintained--has proven inadequate and unreliable. Reform, however, is seriously impeded because (1) formal and informal language learning occurs almost exclusively in the students' first 13 years, (2) teachers have failed to accept and understand the widely divergent dialects, (3) college English departments promote the study of literature rather than instruction in language and its uses, (4) the many strong aspects of today's movement toward a more comprehensive understanding of language cannot be easily organized for pre-college classroom use, (5) an information gap exists between language scholars and educated laymen, and (6) recent research in linguistics is of uneven quality. To remedy such culture lags, the entire language part of the English program must gradually be rebuilt, beginning with the initial teaching of reading and writing. (JB)