What it comes down to is that everybody is different and everybody 
learns differently.  I don't recall what I learned or when I learned it 
(maybe nothing and never), but with my first child I learned that it 
just rubs off.  The girl could read without anybody trying to teach her 
by the time she was three.  By six, she was reading 'chapter books' and 
writing stories with very few errors.  She is now 9 and has surpassed 
most of my high school sophomores and and even a large percentage of  of 
my seniors.  But, she can't spell worth a darn.  Why not?  Given a 
spelling list that she can study, she always gets them all right, but 
when writing a story or an essay she spells simple things incorrectly.  
Why?  I don't know, but I assumed she just wasn't trying.  I was certain 
that her punctuation and her reading skills just rubbed off through 
immersion.  I thought this probably happened with everybody because I 
had no evidence to the contrary except for some high school students 
that couldn't seem to get it at all.  I assumed that this was because 
nobody ever asked them to read.  Nobody read to them.  Nobody asked them 
to write. Nobody asked them to speak.  And when I asked them to do these 
things, they were lazy.  I assumed this was all a combination of bad 
parenting and lazy genetics.  More than grammatical and organizational 
instruction, I had them read and write.  It seemed to work for all of 
them except the lazy ones.

Then I had a son.  I now rely less on immersion. 

Edgar Schuster wrote:
> Yes, I agree with Craig, reading doesn't just "rub off," at least it 
> didn't for me where punctuation is concerned.  In high school, I was 
> as avid a reader as you could find---crazy about Dickens and William 
> James, Shakespeare and Shaw, to name a few, yet I commonly wrote what 
> my teachers called "run-ons"; that is, until I discovered the 
> semicolon.  Then I commonly wrote what they called "fragments."
>
> Having said this, I nevertheless am constantly amazed by my 
> grandchildren's "knowledge" of punctuation.  (They're now in 6th, 7th, 
> 9th, and 10th grades.)  From their earliest years, they just seemed to 
> get it, even some VERY sophisticated stuff (colons and dashes, for 
> example).  When I asked them how they did it, they couldn't tell me, 
> but I know that it was NOT mainly from instruction in either grammar 
> or punctuation (none of them have had any good grammar instruction).  
> Strange that studies have not been done in this area.
>
> Ed Schuster
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-- 

James Sebastian Bear
Montpelier Public School
www.montpelier.k12.nd.us/classroom.html

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