Patty,

From my standpoint, at least, I think a useful analogy might be with
movement: humans who are not developmentally disadvantaged will
automatically learn how to walk, move about etc. -- but that, by itself,
does not make one a good basketball player (as a confirmed klutz, I can
vouch for this!). And people who play basketball a lot or who teach
others to play basketball have a very large inventory of terms for
movements and muscles to let them talk to each other about it. 

When we "teach English" to students who are already English-speakers, we
are not, in fact, teaching them the basics of the language -- we're
teaching them how to do some very specialized things with it, things
that in many cases are *not* natural (writing, and communicating with
audiences that aren't there, for example). It's much more like
basketball than like walking.

-- Bill Spruiell

Dept. of English
Central Michigan University

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