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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.
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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.
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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
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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.