Controversy exists as to the specific approach to use in teaching language arts skills to culturally and linguistically different children who speak non-standard English. Three primary approaches involve eradicating, maintaining, or expanding the home language systems of such children. In the expansion approach, children are taught to use standard English in appropriate context while respecting and maintaining their home language or dialect. The role of the teacher is important in helping these children learn to interpret written and oral forms of standard English. The teacher should make an assessment of the cultural and linguistic diversity within their classrooms and should be speech models for children. Specific strategies can be implemented to assist children in building language facility. These include: (1) using the language experience approach; (2) using pictures to build a visual-auditory association; (3) reading stories to students; (4) using techniques such as expansions, sentence building, sentence combining, and transformation to manipulate oral sentences; and (5) integrating language instruction within other academic areas. (JDD)