• The majority of pre-service teachers come from the dominant, social group that remains largely isolated from diversity experiences (De Onis, 1995; Osajima, 1995; Rao, 2005/2006; White-Clark, 2005)
• Students of color continue to have low achievement and high drop out rates (Lee & Slaughter-Defoe, 1994; White-Clark, 2005).
• Linguistic knowledge is one tool that can be used to teach pre-service teachers about issues of diversity, power, and oppression (Godley et. al., 2006).
• Currently, linguistic knowledge is rarely used as medium to teacher pre-service teachers about diversity, power and oppression issues (Godley et. al., 2006).

This research will design and implement a language unit created for pre-service teachers in order to increase linguistic knowledge and change attitudes toward linguistic diversity. A pretest/posttest design will elicit data to examine:

• effectiveness of the unit
• language attitudes change
• demographic patterns in pre-service teachers