A quick note for any who are curious. In Chinese schools
there are never grammar lessons. However, students must
learn sentence patterns. Reason?

example. In Chinese we say

Yesterday, I go store.
Today, I go store.
Tomorrow, I go store.

The pattern cannot be changed. So beginning English learners will
guess that tenses in English are unimportant but then memorize
the sentence pattern from the grammar book.

Cordially,
S. Barret Dolph
Taipei Taiwan



Bob Yates wrote:

> Herb Stahlke wrote:
>
>
>> The question of how grammar is taught in different cultures has come up =
>> several times recently, as if other cultures necessarily have it right.
>
>
> As someone who teaches English grammar to both pre-service ESL teachers and
> pre-service mother-tongue teachers, I have been thinking a lot about this issue.
>
> For example, ESL teachers need to know about some of the structures of English that
> mother-tongue teachers never have to worry about.  A simple example is the
> count/non-count noun distinction.  I have never seen a dictionary written for
> native speakers which provides any information about whether a noun is count or
> non-count.  The dozen or so non-native dictionaries of English I have all note
> whether the noun is count or non-count.
>
> The grammar structures of English which native speakers need to have some knowledge
> about are those structures for which there is clear dialect variation or knowledge
> of those structures are need to write standard English.  Noguchi focusses on
> identifying independent sentences because many of the non-standard practices that
> teachers perceive in student writing are centered on punctuation.
>
> The other way to approach the question of how different cultures teach about
> language is to look at the language contests that take place in those cultures.  My
> wife is German.  It is inconceivable that there would be spelling bees in German by
> native speakers of the language.  My understanding is that dictation is still a
> major kind of school contest in France.  This makes sense given how much
> inflectional morphology in written French has no spoken realization.  In fact, the
> equivalent of the English simple past tense is hardly even spoken but occurs all
> the time in written texts aimed at kinds of readers.  Given the huge amount of time
> needed to learn the writing system of Chinese, is it any wonder there are
> calligraphy contests?
>
> Herb Stalke mentioned Dick Hudson's review of how grammar is taught in other
> countries.  My own experience agrees with Hudson's findings: speakers of Slavic
> languages know much more about the grammar of their languages than others.  Without
> any evidence (I know very little about the Slavic languages), I wonder if this may
> be due to the extensive case system of those languages with noticeable dialect
> variation from the standard of the language.
>
> To Mike Garant, I wonder what kind of knowledge Finnish teachers have about
> Finnish.  Are they required to take a course on the Finnish language?  What
> aspects of Finnish are considered in the course?
>
> Bob Yates, Central Missouri State University
>
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