The teaching of freshman composition can be a challenging and exciting endeavor if teachers are aware of current linguistic facts about the nature of language variations manifested by their students and the linguistic shortcomings of many textbooks. Awareness of the distinction of linguistic competence and linguistic performance can aid teachers in making freshman composition more realistic to students. These concepts are technically explained in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax by Noam Chomsky (1965), and are applied to dialect for teachers of composition by the Committee on CCCC Language Statement in Students' Right to Their Own Language (1974). With knowledge of linguistic principles, teachers can respond to their students' dialects humanistically and realistically and can teach academic English without making impressionistic and incorrect statements about non-academic variations from their students.

It is important that children develop their communicating skills to be able to interact withother persons in different social contexts. Without the necessary skills, the child will struggleto understand others, as well as to be understood. My qualitative research takes place in a preschoolclass at a primary school in Stockholm, where I from a sociocultural perspective onteaching and learning aim to clarify how the students’ ability to develop their linguisticperformance and their communicative competence is stimulated within this primary preschool’seducational framework. Empirical data was collected both through observations ofthe daily activities in the pre-school class as well as through interviews of three employedteachers. My research indicates that the educational framework in this pre-school class is structured tocomply with the official Swedish Curriculum, Lpo. 94. The students’ linguistic performanceand their communicative competence were well stimulated through a diverse set of organizedactivities and their own unstructured play. My research also concludes that the educationalframework was built around a constant interaction and collaborative measures between theteachers and the students, as well as among the students themselves. I can from thesociocultural perspective hence conclude that the students are given all the tools needed todevelop their linguistic performance and their communicative competence.