The appearance in 1981 of a paper by Sarah Michaels in I which the “topic-associating" style of reporting used by black first-graders in a California school is contrasted with the more highly valued “topic-centred” style of their white classmates, led me to wonder whether these students might be responding to what Dell Hymes (1980) refers to as norms of their respective communities. A comparison between a discourse chunk from the Michaels paper and chunks from transcripts of the speech of older Jamaicans indicated some similarity between the “topic-associating” style and what I had been referring to as the “indirect style" of response (Pollard 1986). In the Jamaican situation directness (similar to the “topic-centred” style) was found to be related to years of schooling.