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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