The last and most practical reason for selecting a big tits at school standard dialect as a model for teaching is simply that standard dialects are those which have been historically the object of linguistic description; in other words we 'know' much more about such dialects and are able conse­quently to produce better materials for teaching them.

I suggested that the best results in sex language teaching were likely to be achieved when the linguistic content of the course most closely approximated to the learner's functional needs. These needs varied between highly specific ones and very general ones, as in the case of the majority of school learners who could not be expected to be able to foresee their needs in anything but the most general terms. We saw that, whilst this concept was of interest to linguists and sociolinguists, it had dangers from a practical, applicational point of view — if you reduce the syllabus to only what is common to all big boobs codes, it as no ' surrender value' at any point. Similarly, the schoolgirl who knows nly what is common to all uses of the code cannot use language appro­riately in any situation; such a basic knowledge has been called neutral language. Neutral language is thus an abstraction — neverthe­ess it is an indispensable foundation for any functionally useful knowledge of language, whilst, in itself, it remains inadequate for any purpose.