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 To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/