Consider the following trends: Globally, “non-native” English speakers are gradually outnumbering “native” speakers. This shift is occurring in part because the population of “native” English speakers is declining, and in part because English is becoming the lingua-franca of many “non-native” English speakers. Such demographic realities mean that in place of one standard English, World Englishes with various standards are being developed that deserve respect. In fact, Standard Edited American English might soon become just one of many dialects.

What might the consequences of such a shift be for instructors who use writing in their courses? I propose the following possibility: Instead of helping multilingual writers adapt their writing to monolingual standards, we might instead spend some of our instructional time teaching monolingual writers to understand, adapt to, and write in different varieties of English. Some researchers believe that the time for such pedagogical change is now, and that we should be teaching both monolingual and multilingual writers to switch among and even to merge different dialects and languages to communicate with diverse global audiences.