luke wrote:But on the ''about the language' versus 'is part of the language', there's nuance.
Yes, there is; but I think you're conflating "bad teaching of grammar" with "grammar". This is more common in the English-speaking world than anywhere else, because most of the grammar teaching we've been exposed to is bad teaching.
For example, people keep insisting that you can't call a noun a "naming word", because it's "a noun", and that's the only proper term for it because it's more than names.
But quite a lot of languages call it a name, or a namer, or something similar. In fact, the ridiculous thing is that "noun" is just a corruption of a Norman French word meaning literally "name".
We use words like "adjective" which are inherently meaningless to a monolingual native speaker, but were meaningful to Ancient Romans. We copy their terminology, and ignore their logic: they invented terminology to explain things, not to obscure.
I learned that noun was "person, place or thing", and a verb was an "action word", but very little more even after I'd graduated from university. Some years later, someone added 'idea' to the list of things that are nouns. I've heard other definitions of noun, such as "a word you can put 'the' in front of". My point is that the language skills of a native speaker are often not limited or even influenced by knowledge of grammar.
So... bad teaching.
I've shared before how I teach the basic parts of speech.
I write the following sentences (but one at a time):
I have a _______.
I ______ it.
I have a _____ house.
I get students to give me a list of words that go in the gaps. (I do one at a time, not all three.)
They give me lots of right answers, and few wrong answers, then I say "we call those nouns", "we call those verbs" and "those are adjectives".
Wrong answers to nouns usually start with vowels, which are legitimate nouns and only fail to fit because of the a/an rule. Some people get overenthusiastic and give whole noun phrases (e.g. big pink elephant).
The verbs typically start in the present but also go into the past. Sometimes I get more than one word in the answer, and we get will do, would like etc.
If I get a wrong answer with an adjective, it's again on a technicality of having more than one word, and I get qualified adjectives -- "really big" etc.
All of it shows that the concept of nouns, verbs and adjectives are already well-formed in the students' heads, including the recognition of phrasal units as belonging to the same part of speech as individual words, and the goal of (native language) grammar instruction isn't to teach what these concepts are, but to draw conscious attention to them so that we can gain conscious command.
Why is conscious command important to the native speaker? Because there will be times that we are conscious of our own language production, not least of all writing -- very few people can genuinely "write like they speak" because when they slow down to write, they lose the grasp of their automatic processes.
So yes... natives... but what does that mean for non-natives?
Well, first up, those same unconscious processes we use for spontaneous L1 speech can interfere with our L2. Having some level of conscious command of both L1 and L2 grammars gives us a means of actively fighting that interference.
More than that, though, it's not only writing in our native language that combines our conscious and unconscious command of language: whenever we find ourselves asked to speak in a formal setting -- delivering an unscripted or semi-scripted speech, being interviewed by a radio host or a police office -- we also blend the conscious and unconscious; we "speak in writing", almost. Every day in our native language we blend this way, so why wouldn't we want to in a foreign language? And if the conscious variable is the easiest part of the equation for us to make improvements on, doesn't it make sense to put some focus on it?
So here...
You did state that grammar can be learned intuitively, and that's true, although the 'grammar' won't be conceptualized the same way. There is a certain 'metaness' (aboutness) with explicit grammar.
...it's less meta than you think. Unless we're talking about bad grammar descriptions that confuse more than they clarify.
Educated people like you and BeaP are often assisted by theoretical frameworks, such as grammar. Perhaps this is the nexus of debate between the 'no grammar' and 'grammar is necessary' folks. An uneducated person may have difficulty with the theoretical framework and may not find it helpful when they're trying to go about their life in a foreign language.
...which is why grammar descriptions need to be more and more intuitive. Allowing the pro-grammar narrative to be controlled by the old public school with their dry technical descriptions and their arbitrary invented rules about needing to never split infinitives or how prepositions are terrible things to end clauses with holds us back.
We need to stand up for grammar while rejecting that sort of thing.
[quote]But I'm sure there are well-informed people who think the 'no grammar' folks are peddling snake oil, and they may be right.[quote]
Good "no grammar" instruction doesn't exist -- every teacher teaches grammar, so traditionally it hasn't often been snake oil -- it's proper antibiotics in a bottle marked "snake oil". The big gurus have convinced themselves of their own hype, but that's not immediately damaging because their practices still work.
The real problem now, though, is that the internet has enabled non-teachers to push the snake oil wagon, and they don't have the experience or ability to unconsciously hide the grammar in the method.
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