Secondary English teachers are charged with helping all students to read, write, and understand English in its many forms and functions. However, students' language can be as diverse as the literature teachers bring to the classroom. Not all students come to the classroom with the skills to write standardized English; even fewer students come with the skills to read vernacular texts. But for teachers to translate each unfamiliar word or grammatical structure doesn't lead to independent, linguistically savvy readers. Instead, they would like students themselves to become more sure-footed readers of dialectally diverse literature. That's what this article offers: the "what," "how," and "why" of teaching vernacular-rich texts. The authors will show that linguistically based approaches--contrastive analysis and code-switching--can give students a handle on the unfamiliar language of dialectally diverse texts. Then, they'll explore how students can use language to interrogate issues of identity, power, prestige, and prejudice in society. (Contains 6 figures.)