Native students of which languages spent considerable time on studying their own language?

[tarvos]

I think we studied grammar until about something comparable to 9th grade or so in the US, or grade 9 in Canada. I'm talking about the Netherlands, and given I was in a bilingual school system, something similar held for English.

(I don't have anything to add to what Cainntear has already said, and I agree totally with him. I think his points are very well reflected in the current societal outrage over racism and discrimination).

[rdearman]

Let's all play nicely together.

[ninuno]

ninuno, I'm surprised you mention Chinese speakers. In my experience, it is extremely rare to meet a Chinese speaker who knows anything about Mandarin grammar. Do you know what a 动宾合词 (動賓合詞, verb-object compound) is and how it affects the placement of 了, for example?

Regarding the question of the thread, most Spanish speakers are not taught much about grammar. I think it's common across countries to teach something about subjects and direct objects, what articles are, that verbs have forms that change with the subject (yo, tú, nosotros...), a few things like that. But unlike French and Arabic educated speakers, Spanish speakers can't generally spit out conjugation paradigms well, or tell you what pronoun case goes with which preposition (para mí, según yo, conmigo).

I think French, Czech and Arabic speakers have to be taught quite a lot of grammar as part of education because the three languages have fairly divergent or very divergent standard forms, in more formal and written contexts.

I must have been talking about the writing system of chinese and japanese .. sorry for any misunderstanding caused .


In case of arabic , i do not know . I'm recently starting on arabic and looks like a hybrid of french , german and russian with a complicated orthography .

[Saim]

Or are you gonna claim that the majority of the well educated, intelligent and successful people confuses "you're" and "your"? Because that is an example of a very common mistake that kids need to be helped to get rid of, to not appear stupid later on.

[...]

I wouldn't call anybody "idiot" for "I and he". But if a native confuses you're/your and writes grammEr, they simply look dumb.

All of these are examples of arbitrary spelling conventions. Earlier you were talking about "helping kids speak better", if your point is now that they should just be taught standard spelling conventions, Cainntear made the argument that that's easier when you teach grammatical awareness that respects the grammar that children have already acquired as part of their native model:

Teaching good conventions in writing is really just a matter of teaching grammar awareness, which is quite different from grammar instruction. Everyone already has a sufficient implicit understanding of parts-of-speech to learn spelling conventions based on them. (There is an argument that such conventions are not cognitively useful, and that language would be better letting homophones be homographs, but I'll set that aside for now.)

Put very simply, the explanation "their is like our, they're is like we're" uses the native speakers intuitive understanding of word class to teach the rule. It is not new grammar, and it is not a new part of their language model.

Cainntear also made the argument that children show better attainment when they are allowed to start education in their native language variety, which doesn't (necessarily) mean that they should never acquire any other variety and learn to use it in certain contexts. Presumably it's easier to teach people to be more multilingual/multidialectal when the starting point isn't that they should forget and neglect their own mother tongue, so in practice telling students that their way of speaking is wrong can actually restrict their access to dominant language varieties. Also pretending that archaic forms ("whom" and so on) are the dominant or prestige forms is a bad way of teaching the truly dominant forms, which is something you seem to agree with if I've understood you correctly.

I personally think that we should dismantle all language hierarchies in the long run (so my position is perhaps even further from yours than Cainntear's is), that's my deeply-held political belief. That said, I don't that's something that can be immediately enforced through the school system, since schools obviously aren't an autonomous sphere that can completely ignore the market pressures and wider social prejudice you mentioned. For that reason in the current situation I don't see what's wrong with schools encouraging students to add dominant language varieties to their linguistic repertoires, but why does that need to be accompanied with the total abandonment of non-dominant language varieties?

[ANGELINA]

YES,in my oppinion ,very language needs a considerable time to get commmand of grammer when somebody needs to write not just to speak .If it is just a conversation and no written expression is required, then it does not require much time to learn grammar.As a native Chinese speaker ,I spent a lot of time in school to learn grammer to write articles or a letters.BUT we I was three ,I can meke myself understood without knowing grammer .

[SophiaMerlin_II]

Now, I’m not sure if it has to do with language instruction in the classroom or not, but I notice the vast majority of Americans I know cannot shift their register at all.

The people who speak in a “low” register can’t usually move into a “middle” one, and if they do try, we end up with formations like “conversate” instead of converse. (Although in AAVE conversate is part of a distinct higher register) Those who speak in a “middle” register and try to move into a “formal” one often parody either their idea of British English or some sort of bastardized “olde Englishe” concept and end up with something like “I made a cuppeth of tea-eth”.

There is no understanding of how lower register words (eat/talk) become higher register words (dine/converse). Or no idea of how lower register phrases move up the register (take a piss -> use the toilet -> go to the bathroom -> use the restroom -> visit the ladies room -> etc up into contrived forms “use the facilities” and archaic forms such as “powder my nose”).

But people who are used to higher registers also seem to have a lot of difficulty moving down as well. Academics who can’t drop their jargon. Middle register speakers who can’t speak or understand lower registers.

All registers have their place and they’re all English. Lower registers have more variation and that’s okay.

For example, the dialect I grew up with and switch to when I’m tired is totally okay with the phrase “Must is, cause was ain’t don’t sound right”, “y’all” is perfectly okay, “all y’all” has a distinct meaning, and so on. It’s also firmly in a lower register.

My family, on the other hand, uses mainly a middle register and uses a higher ones as a form of family amusement.

Do I speak with my coworkers and my customers in the same register? No. Do I write and speak in the same register? Usually not. Did I use the same register when I worked in politics as I use now while working in a restaurant? No.

The idea of dialects being “okay” or “not okay” completely misses the entire concept of register.

What is commonly referred to as “Ebonics” or “AAVE” is an English dialect. It has it’s own set of grammar rules. It even has (at least) two distinct levels of register. It even has leftovers from older English “standards” — for example it has retained the pronunciation “ax” for the word ask.

However AAVE is a non-standard dialect and is very much going to continue to be. Due to racism it will continue to be viewed as a “broken” way of speaking, even though it isn’t.

I do not think that teaching AAVE is bad. I think in a lot if ways it would probably be good for kids. However I disagree with the idea that it is the only dialect that should be taught. “Mid-Atlantic” is the standard dialect in the US and deviation from its middle and upper register is considered “stupid” in professional settings. That is unlikely to change.