Question:
On a mailing list about teaching (other language) to English-speakers,
participants have complained that British students seem to be
allergic to grammar and don't seem to know words like "noun",
"adjective", "verb" and so on.
I recall being told about grammar in both English and foreign language
lessons. Does this no longer happen? Are the people on this mailing
list exaggerating? How can you study a foreign language (to any useful
extent) without knowing what verbs, adjectives, tenses and so on are?
Answer:
It was a long time ago, but ISTR that words like "noun", "adjective"
and "verb" would have been taken for granted in English lessons. And
we certainly did things about phrases and clauses (which we probably
_didn't_ do in French and German). I no longer have any of my stuff from
school - there was only so much I could take from my mother's house
before she emigrated to Australia, and exercise books from secondary
school didn't seem like something I'd ever look at again. I hadn't
from 1984 to 1998, after all. The vagueness of my memories is why I'm
asking here, of course.
It may depend on your language. Even in English books for native
English speakers up to 16, wouldn't there be a table of irregular past
tense forms and past participles (swim swam swum) etc. somewhere?
Maybe this sort of thing is junior rather than secondary school.
I'm not sure about this. If your native language is French, German or
Italian I would expect you'd need to be able to talk about cases,
tenses, moods, adjectives, participles etc. at school.
I have some Italian textbooks for native speakers, and they're full of
grammar. I suspect most of them may be university level, though. I
should check to see if I have any secondary school stuff. Italian has
so many verb endings, tenses and moods that I'd have thought even
Italian school children have tables of them. I know from experiment
that many Italians can't remember the past historic well enough to be
able to speak in it, and lots of (non-educated) Italians make mistakes
with subjunctives, imperatives and the spelling of certain types of
plurals.
Also, the fact that Italians who teach Italian to English native
speakers are astonished at English people not knowing basic grammar
terminology must mean something. Anyway, that claim that some of their
students want to be taught Italian without having to learn any
grammar, which seems very silly. And some of these people claim to
have done French and/or German without doing any grammar, which seems
very odd.
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