Still going strong grading 11th grade essays on the singular topic, "Write a letter to the director of a foreign exchange program for which you have been selected, informing him/her of the country you wish to visit. Give reasons to support this..." and yada yada....so....

I've learned a great deal of geography- Paris is in Italy, English people speak French, Australians speak Spanish, Africa is a whole country, as are Europe, Asia, and South America. South America is in Mexico, the Washington Monument and Leaning Tower of Pizza (sic) stand in Paris, Mt. Fuji is by the Great Wall, and, let's see, Mount Kilamanjaro towers over Tokyo. It's an interesting new world!

OK, enough fun- I'm going to give them a break. MOST of the kids know where they are and where they want to visit. I've actually learned from some of them. I'm learning that some people in Arkansas wish to visit Canada because they can take a higher quota of ducks, geese, and whitetails, and the whitetails of Canada surpass 300 pounds, while those of the great state of Arkansas barely top 220.

To be fair, I was discussing with a colleague, let's see how many of US could accurately locate Little Rock on a map of Arkansas. Or name any other major city there. He agreed...yup...that's true! Few of us could!

We don't grade on geography knowledge, though. We grade on standardized English. That's tough because there are several dialects we're looking at. Many intelligent, articulate people just do not know much standard English. Every language has its standard form. Chinese, Arabic, Spanish- kids have to learn those standard forms in school, too, when possible. However, different dialects have their own grammar. The grammar usually follows fairly standard rules. The main dialect groups I have been coming across are the Southern/Ozark dialect and the Ebonic/African-American dialect. I'm pretty familiar with variants of both dialects, living principally among Appalachian and African-Americans in Cincinnati.
So, when someone says they want to go to "Spine" I KNOW this is not a usage error. It is considered a mechanical error, because in the south "spine" and "Spain" are homophones. It is difficult to mark off "It is" in ebonics as a usage error, because in that dialect it means "there are" or "there is", kind of akin to the Spanish "hay". It has no number agreement. The Ebonic possessive is the same as the subject pronoun. In other words, "their hands" = the Ebonic "they hands". "My" is the only commonly used possessive (form of "I"). "His", "their", and "your" are not used. It's also difficult to mark off usage errors when kids of both those dialects switch the perfect for preterite- "I run all the way to the store" or "I have to see how the government is ran". Think French- French uses the perfect (with their "to have") in order to describe preterite action. In some English dialects, the same happened, but the people dropped the "to have" form. Interesting switcharound. Also, in some English dialects, a double negative is common. In standard English, it is not, though it is in all Romance languages.
Then frequently I come across papers written by kids whom I immediately identify as Spanish speakers. I recognize the Spanish syntax immediately and know they write much more understandably in Spanish (though it may not be completely standard, either). It's hard to have to mark errors when I the error is only due to their being so new to English. I can even recognize how much schooling they have had in Spanish. If they speak, but don't write, Spanish, their English has fewer spelling errors due to Spanish written phonetics. I knew a Spanish speaker in Chicago who didn't write Spanish at all, even though he had an accent when he spoke English. His writing skills were purely English, phonetically. When he met a girl from Spain named Cruz, she pronounced it "Cruthe" and that is exactly how he wrote it! Once I read a paper of a girl trying to pass herself off as a Latin with only 1 year of English, and I knew she wasn't because she spelled "competent" something like "compitit" and that is not a spelling error a Spanish speaker could ever make, since the word "competente" exists in Spanish and is never prounced with a schwa, so there is never any question what vowels belong there. The guy I just mentioned couldn't have even made that mistake. I think she was just pretending because she misread the prompt and thought she had to pretend to be an exchange student in the US.

It's all a test of the standard form of English, though. So even though I know how dialects are, I have to grade it using the standard form. I just hate that someone of reasonable intelligence will appear ignorant in the eyes of others simply because they have not learned much standard English.