Education and grammar.

now it's beginning to sound a bit dubious...
were haylofts involved ?

Do you remember subject and predicate ?
5 (or7) column analysis is just the same thing as parsing only drawing up separate columns for subject, verb, direct object, indirect object etc etc.

i had a bizarre conversation with a young kenyan who said she had great difficulty coming to england because of the interrogative tags. and asked me about them.
i said i couldn't help her as i didn't have a passport, and hadn't been to an airport for many years.
i assumed they were something attached to luggage to signal destination. i'd never heard the phrase before.
she said i must know all about them as i was english.
she looked baffled and annoyed, as if she didn't believe me.
i'm sure she'd have been quite at home with your columns.

There werent no columns wen I were at school in england.

I did no wot a nown were though.

My 9 year granddaughter writes English more correctly than some posters on forums; her primary school lays emphasis on the teaching of it.

Although I am a native English speaker, I was educated overseas and was taught English as a foreign language, so I quite understand your Kenyan friend’s confusion, welbeck. It was only when I came back to the U.K. for secondary education that I realised that most of my classmates in England just used language without knowing the names or functions of parts of speech and grammatical constructions.

her confusion !
what about mine ? i felt as if i had wandered into a pinter play.
no idea what was going on, and a brooding sense of somehow being wrong-footed.

by the way, i love the way kenyans point with their lips.

As long as we can all communicate our thoughts, feelings, wishes and opinions, I would say we're doing ok.

With or without columns.

English is pretty challenging. It is definitely a contender for the world's most difficult language.

My DH and I have our sad moments when we discuss spelling. This is usually after one of us has receive a text from a dear friend (aged 77). They are always splattered with spelling errors and lack punctuation.

I quote (beginning and end) from Phoney Phonics by Vivian Buchan
"One reason why I cannot spell,
Although I learned the rules quite well
Is that some words like coup and through
Sound just like threw and flue and Who;
And then I ponder over though,
Is it spelled so, or throw, or beau,
And bough is never bow, it's bow,
I mean the bow that sounds like plow,
And not the bow that sounds like row -
The row that is pronounced like roe.
I wonder, too, why rough and tough,
That sound the same as gruff and muff ...
So though I try, I still despair
And moan and mutter "It's not fair
That I'm held up to ridicule
And made to look like such a fool
When it's the spelling that's at fault.
Let's call this nonsense to a halt."

^geekesse Thu 20-Aug-20 21:24:41

People who can’t communicate clearly tend to get frustrated because they can’t understand what is being said, or because they can’t get their ideas across, and resort to insults, name-calling and foul language as a way of expressing frustration. They are sometimes very sensitive about their obvious problems, and may become quite abusive to people who do communicate well.^

That to me sounds like a blame game, you are giving an excuse for unreasonable behaviour. No matter how frustrated someone gets, there's still no need to be abusive, rude or insulting.

I reckon the rot set in in the sixties, when the teaching of the English language in schools started putting more emphasis on self-expression than on writing accurately and grammatically - and the grammar and accuracy were enthusiastically thrown right out by a generation of young teachers. It was the age of hippiedom, and rulebooks were being abandoned all over the place.

The best way to learn the grammar of a language is to hear it spoken properly from an early age, and to read, read, read. Then when it is taught as a school subject the patterns are already known and are getting labels. That way they make sense, and if the use of them is encouraged they will be second nature . If mistakes are completely ignored then they are repeated and become entrenched.

However, that assumes that the people heard speaking it are (reasonably) literate and that the writers of the books have absorbed it grammatically. There is a snowball effect if the majority of the population either haven't heard or read decent English or they think it is elitist and condescending to be expected to speak or write it. Once the potential teachers don't use it automatically it is very difficult for young people to pick it up unless they are avid readers with articulate parents.

I think part of the problem is that children spend so much time nowadays using technology, that they are reading less than before. Of course the technology is important, but they need a balance.

Research has found that when children read extensively they become better writers. Reading a variety of genres helps children learn text structures and language that they can then transfer to their own writing. In addition, reading provides young people with prior knowledge that they can use in their stories.

As child, I always had my nose stuck in a book, it gave me so much pleasure and still does.

Yes, and they do it painlessly. It isn't learning abstract rules and applying them, it is absorbing the patterns into their own speech and writing.

I too was reading everything I could get hold of from an early age.

@welbeck, I can well understand the young Kenyan’s difficulty! I used to teach English as a foreign language, to (mostly) speakers of Arabic, and question tags (as we called them then) were always a problem.
Native speakers won’t usually have heard the term, since it’s never a thing they had to learn or even think about. I’d never heard the term until I started teaching TEFL.

‘She left yesterday, didn’t she?

‘You’ll do it tomorrow, won’t you?’

‘I’ve been so stupid, haven’t I?’

Whereas many other languages use the same tag for everything - among others e.g. n’est-ce pas?, nicht wahr? and there’s a Greek equivalent, too - in English it’s just another thing for the poor learners to get their tongues around.

Although at least we don’t have noun genders or a lot of conjugations/declensions to learn. Swings and roundabouts...

Surely there is a universal, multi-purpose, all-applicable tag Elegran- innit?

In the original post one group of readers subscribes to an imaginary conspiracy theory that local police have covered up a murder.There is no evidence at all for this but they are determined to stick to this idea and this has led to conflict with the other readers leading to abuse and frustration.

Yes, @MawB2 - if only I could have told my poor learners to use ‘innit?’ - and sod it - but unfortunately there were exams they needed to pass!

Exams? Wosssat then?