‘Do yow spake proper ?’ ‘Are you working me ?!’ : The importance of integrating language variety into foreign language teaching

Despite current methods in Second Language Acquisition favouring a communicative approach, the majority of textbooks used in Greece still focus on the standard variety of either British or American English, thus treating language as a uniform entity and overlooking the fact that language comes in many geographical and social varieties. In this talk I shall argue that this provides language learners with a limited understanding of language and outline ways in which language variety could be brought into the classroom.