Basic to successful teaching of standard English to speakers of Black English is an assessment of teacher and student attitudes toward each language and their perceptions of one another's attitudes toward each language. Regardless of how innovative or unique methods of teaching language and communication promise to be or how instructive and enlightening curriculum workshops or institutes may be, unless teachers soften negative attitudes toward dialect and dialect speakers, it is doubtful that any meaningful progress toward facilitating language teaching, learning, and use can be successfully effected. Teachers need to be aware that many linguists consider Black English to be a different, highly structured, and fully developed linguistic system with an internal consistency and regularity in its phonological, grammatical, and semantic components. While many students want to learn standard English for academic and professional reasons, many consider their black dialect valuable for their personal and group communicative, expressive, and identity needs. (MKM)