Grammar teaching in schools

[jehane]

I've been reading a few of the grammar discussions and thought it would be interesting to compare how grammar is taught in various school systems. Please stick to primary and secondary as I assume that will be common to most people. So:

Language: English
Schooling: Government school (aka state/public)
Country: Australia (WA)
Decade(s): 80s/90s

Grammar was virtually non-existent in my curriculum. We were taught nouns/verbs/adjectives/adverbs, basic contractions, subject/predicate. Ummm, that's pretty much it. Nothing about dangling participles, split infinitives, etc.

More of a writing style issue, but we *were* repeatedly told to avoid using "said" in our writing; I recall one classroom which had a poster with lists of alternatives for "said".

[rkomar]

I was taught pretty much the same thing in the public school system in Ontario/Canada in the 60's and 70's, except that I also remember learning about clauses and where to put commas. I rank that up there with the multiplication table for usefulness in my later life.

Same here. Alberta, Canada in the 80s and 90s. However, we did learn a bit more about grammar in French classes.

[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by jehane

Grammar was virtually non-existent in my curriculum. We were taught nouns/verbs/adjectives/adverbs, basic contractions, subject/predicate. Ummm, that's pretty much it. Nothing about dangling participles, split infinitives, etc.

Dangling participles and split infinitives don't have anything to do with grammar, they are about style.

Grammar is about the rules that are used to speak a particular language or dialect correctly - things like saying "He does" rather than "He do" or "from him" rather than "from he".

Since most native speakers are able to speak the language already, I think it's hard to know how much grammar you really ought to teach - I know we touched on the fact that prepositions take the objective case, which is why it's "from him," but we didn't spend too much time on it because no one in the class was going around saying "from he". And to the extent that people did make common grammatical mistakes "He has already went home," I think teachers tended to focus more on explaining that "gone" is the appropriate from to use without deploying an extended explanation of what participles are, only to correct one.

(Note that in certain dialects of English, "have went" is the usual form; the problem wasn't that the student didn't know about past participle; it's that they particular dialect he spoke used a non-standard past participle form.)

Note that there are complicated grammatical rules that people learning English as a second language need to learn, but that most native speakers know intuitively and don't have to memorize, such as the rules for the order in which adjectives are used when you use more than one.

1. Opinion or judgment -- beautiful, ugly, easy, fast, interesting
2. Size -- small, tall, short, big
3. Age -- young, old, new, historic, ancient
4. Shape -- round, square, rectangular
5. Color -- red, black, green, purple
6. Nationality -- French, Asian, American, Canadian, Japanese
7. Material -- wooden, metallic, plastic, glass, paper
8. Purpose or Qualifier -- foldout sofa, fishing boat, racing car

Without knowing any of these rules, native speakers would know that "The French old big ugly woman is late" is not correct.

I think most people actually learn grammar from learning a foreign language; it's not clear what benefit native speakers would get from a more extensive theoretical grammatical explanation in grade school/HS.

[crich70]

We did break sentences down into the participle and gerund etc. in my high school (late 80's early 90's) but other than stuff like that the class also stuck to mostly the normal stuff i.e. nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives etc. I never could get the hang of figuring out the participle and gerund or what else was involved much less where it went on the diagram. I learned more about sentence structure from reading than from school.

[rkomar]

Originally Posted by jehane

More of a writing style issue, but we *were* repeatedly told to avoid using "said" in our writing; I recall one classroom which had a poster with lists of alternatives for "said".

Was "was like" in the list?

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

Without knowing any of these rules, native speakers would know that "The French old big ugly woman is late" is not correct.

Strange. I think it also has to do with feeling. I was looking at your list, and didn't really understand it. (Maybe it being 3 AM here has something to do with that.) It hit me when I saw your sentence, and I immediately thought: That's wrong. This sentence doesn't sound right. It has to be "The ugly big old French woman is late".

Then I also understood the list. A word from the "1" row always comes before a word from the "2" row, and so on, and my assumption turned out to be correct. I never learned that. I even didn't learn it when I was studying English for two years, full time (almost 15 years ago); but it could have been in year 3 or 4.

Still, I immediately "felt" what the correct word order should be. Maybe it's because I read a lot of English (about 95%), and I just know because of reading correct word orders way more often than wrong ones.

On the other hand, I have the same "feeling" when reading or writing Dutch. Often I read something, and I think: "That's wrong, but I don't know why. It has to be like <reconstruct stuff here>." Then I'm going to look it up, and most of the time, it turns out I'm right. Still, I'm 100% percent sure I never learned it; or I did learn it and it became some sort of instinct or something.

Even so, I'm sure I make quite a lot of mistakes. I wouldn't be surprised if there are a few within this post.

[Fluribus]

If we weren't meant to split infinitives, they wouldn't be splittable. As long as the meaning isn't damaged, split away. I suspect that some English speakers have been jealous of languages where the infinitive is a single word. English was too unruly for them.

[usuallee]

I don't remember being taught any grammar at all beyond middle school. I think I manage to use proper grammar most of the time, but it's all by "feel". I barely know what an adverb is, let alone a gerund :-)

[HarryT]

When I was in secondary school in England in the 1970s I was taught English grammar formally and thoroughly. We started with defining the "parts of speech" (what verbs, nouns, adverbs, prepositions, etc, are), went on to parse sentences, and then went forward from there. I do think it's a shame that grammar seems not to be taught any more, for two very good reasons:

1. You can't talk about language if you're not equipped with the vocabulary to do so.
2. It makes it much more difficult to learn a foreign language if you don't understand the grammar of your own language.

For many years I've been one of the moderators on the online forum which supports students for a distance-learning Latin course, and the thing which trips people up every year is not problems with Latin, but the fact that many of the young people on the course have never been taught English grammar, and hence just don't understand basic grammatical ideas. We get some people who don't understand what words like "noun" and "verb" mean.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Fluribus

If we weren't meant to split infinitives, they wouldn't be splittable. As long as the meaning isn't damaged, split away. I suspect that some English speakers have been jealous of languages where the infinitive is a single word. English was too unruly for them.

Ideas like "split infinitives" and saying "It is I" rather than "It is me" come from Victorian grammarians' obsession with trying to force English into the straitjacket of Latin grammar. In Latin the infinitive is a single word, and hence can't be split, but that's certainly not the case in English, and saying "you can't split the infinitive in Latin, so you shouldn't do so in English" is just... silly. English is not Latin and has different grammar.

[exscentric]

50's mid-america public schools had lots of English, my last however was 9th grade and almost flunked that - it made no sense to me. Had a bone head semester in college that didn't sink in either. Basically if it sounds right it is good to me - has worked for the most part for many years :-( I have learned a lot from Word grammar checker which helps today. However when proofing with Word Perfect and Word and they disagreed I was really confused :-)

[jehane]

Originally Posted by rkomar

Was "was like" in the list?

LOL. I don't recall it being there, but it was like, 25 years ago.

[DiapDealer]

I remember diagramming sentences 'til I was blue in the face. Of course I loved words, so it wasn't really any kind of burden.

[crich70]

I found this just a little bit ago. Haven't tried it yet but it looks interesting.
Grammer Checker