Did YOU learn English grammar at school? Me no.

After willingly taking redundancy from the stress of my main career, I took a part time job in a senior school. After having 3 children and 5 grandchildren, I was still very surprised at what is taught these days. Have any of you ever heard of onomatopoeia ?? And that was just the start of it in English. In Geography the kids couldn't even differentiate between countries, cities etc the focus was on volcanoes, erosion, oxbows !! etc In Maths, we now have " bidmas" ?? They even subtract differently, borrowing from a different place that I was taught !! We are teaching kids French and Spanish when so many of them haven't even got a grasp of English i.e. Every other word is " like". I am all for progress and changes for the better, however, a lot of plain common sense is sadly missing and I feel so sorry for the teachers who have no choice in what they teach anymore.

I went to school from 1960-76. The teachers were trying to be 'modern' and therefore some of the old methods were thrown out to be be replaced with, well I'm not quite sure.
English was all right, but we didn't go into the finer details such as subjunctive, split infinitives or reflexive nouns (whatever that is) - I still don't know what some of these are. I have to remind myself about basics such as nouns, proper nouns, verbs and adjectives.
At secondary school our English teacher told the whole class that we shouldn't write, "You did/said ..." and should instead write, "One did/said ..." Shame that we were in our teens before this was pointed out. We muddled along.
How maths - that's another story. My lack of talent in that direction has always been an embarrassment.

I was never taught complex grammar in school but we did do some language exercises as well as composition and other English tasks. The reason why grammar teaching was dropped is that it was taken off the Some teacher friends of mine ten years older than me had kept a sheaf of old 'O' level papers and they did have grammar questions on them.

When I taught English starting in 1979 it rapidly became clear to me that a knowledge of the language, its grammar and how it worked was essential so I began to teach myself from textbooks so I could teach the children in my classes. I found, though, that I knew nearly all the rules simply from reading.

To be honest, for most pupils, getting them to write accurate, correctly spelt English was a continuous struggle and as much as I could expect to succeed with (and not even then with some children.)

I think that the reason that some children find grammar and accuracy difficult is that they do not read habitually or, in some cases, at all.

As for whether grammar is important I think it is. You can write accurately without a knowledge of the actual terms or without being able to parse. However, knowledge is power and really knowing what you are doing gives an omniscient and influential edge to your thinking and writing. It's like the difference between an old Bakelite telephone and an iPhone X.

Is this something that conforms to the four stages of competence model?
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence
When I write English I am unconsciously competent, but in French definitely still consciously competent i.e. having to do lots of thinking and checking.
The background knowledge is useful, but when I write in English I am thinking more about if it looks and sounds right, rather than drawing on my knowledge of the rules for the third conditional etc.

So does the apostrophe misuse bug anyone? It really annoys me. I used to travel through St James' Park tube station and each station sign has the apostrophe in a different place. Talk about political grammar corrections gone too far!

I don't know if anyone watched Points of View on the BBC yesterday. I stumbled across it...and it was talking about viewer complaints about a continuity person announcing what was coming up on the BBC....one of the numerous examples the person was announcing was about something coming on at "free firty" (three thirty). The BBC responded by saying that they are a diverse organisation and like to show different and varying accents...I don't have a problem with different and varying accents...but at least learn how to say the words correctly in the first place, particularly if you are British, as he was.

I think my English language education was quite good - certainly better than either of my children (or DH!). I enjoyed Latin but eventually gave it up for Art. I now go to a monastery where Gregorian Chant is the order of the day and my knowledge of Latin enhances my enjoyment of that. Can't do direct translation but can make sense of it.

W11girl - I sooo agree with you! A few years back I was asked to perfect the English pronunciation of an uppercrust manager of Italian TV. With his pompous voice, - he thought he knew the lot - I had agonising difficulty in containing my mirth when he said things like: firty free/ free fings. This is baby talk for us (small British children do have difficulty with the TH sound), but when you hear it spoken by an adult, to me, it is just laughable!

I can`t understand why my 5 years grandson is being taught about split diagraphs

I think it is a bit unfair to mock non-native speakers for not getting the pronunciation of 'th' right. It is very hard for people learning a language later in life.
I still struggle to produce 'dessous' and 'dessus' in a way that my neighbours will understand. ?

Um -- isn't it 'dessoo' and 'desseeuw'? (a bit like teenagers' 'eeuw gross' but not quite so much W on the end )

Sort of Siobhan, but dessus is much more nasal and needs the mouth to be shaped in a different way.
I learnt the distinction of ou and ew at school, but it isn't good enough for the neighbours. ?

I have no problem with roue and rue so I guess the context comes into it as well.

It is useful to learn some grammar but unfortunately the Government has now decided that all primary children should learn masses of grammar. And even changed some of the names of the tenses and parts of speech. Madness.

For the french 'u' I was told to form your mouth for 'oo' then say 'ee'.

I think assuming that certain "faulty" pronunciations can easily be rectified is incorrect.

My son has difficulty pronouncing th - he does not have a cockney accent and doesn't have problems with other letter sounds. I pronounce th quite naturally but my husband can't because his first language is French. I believe in Hindi there is a sound somewhere between our "th" and "d" which is very difficult to attain unless you have grown up with the language.

I do think it is quite useful to know the names of different tenses and parts of speech but I'm not at all sure that drumming this into young children is the right way to go. I loved English at school and going to the library each weekend but I think my enthusiasm would have been dampened by lots of teaching of grammar.

I went to school in Scotland in the 1950s-1960s and t here we were taught grammar, but I don't think anyone ever bothered labelling the tenses. After all, if you grow up with English as your first language, you are more or less using the correct tense before you ever get to school.

By the way if anyone is wondering the present continuous is when we say I am writing, the present simple I write.

So you see what I mean don't you? The native speaker knows that we say he is doing something, while he is actually doing it, where he does it, means that he is in the habit of doing such and such. No trouble to us, but getting a foreigner to understand the distinction can be tough, It all depends on how their native language distinguishes between doing something habitually and doing it right now or at the time something else happens.

I was having a bath when the phone rang. Try translating that into French or Spanish. You need two different past tenses for the two different things going on in that sentence, which we find just as confusing, as the average Spanish or French person faced with the difference in English between He takes the train to work every day, and he is taking the train to work today.

Thise of us who went to school in the 50s and 60s were taught grammar (I remember the parsing and clause analysis in grammar school -and enjoyed it)but for many children it was a turn off as was hsvi g tgere work covered in red corrections all the time. So in the 70s & 80s (these timings are approximate) schools were told to allow free expression with minimal correction so as not to

(Pressed post too soon!)
So as not to put them off writing. This went too far and resulted in a generation who has poor grammar and unfortunately this includes many of today's teachers.
Now we have come full circle and very complicated grammar is being taught in primary schools . It's just not true that it isn't taught nowadays! However the tide will turn again at some point I expect!

I learned about grammar through learning Latin. I do find it easier if I also understand the grammar of a new language but the real thing is just to be able to speak and be understood whether or not it is grammatical.

I loved English language at School, but cant recall having learnt some of the things other readers have written. I found Latin was very good later on, when I studied Nursing. I am fluent in Swedish, now thats an odd language, even more dead than Latin I am afraid, I mean who speaks Swedish outside Sweden for heaven sake!

I was at primary school 1953-1959 and at a girls grammar school until 1966. Every mistake was marked in red. I only vaguely remember being taught English grammar, I picked it up when I started learning French and Latin. Both those languages have made learning Italian easier. We had elocution at some point, I could never talk 'posh' without convulsing into giggles. I found that the grammar and spelling of my graduate work colleagues was often very poor - I went to teacher training college not university but in some ways had a more thorough basic education. My grammar school had teachers with good degrees and was excellent.

This weekend grandparents and parents sat around helping Year 6 DGD to do her English grammar homework. All the adults are over educated and three have degrees in arts subjects, but we really struggled to get to grips with the grammar. Part of it was the change of vocabulary for the different grammatical constructs (Lots of, 'Oh we always knew it as.....') but we were all agreed that what she was doing we did not meet until we were in grammar school.

I went to 8 primary schools and 2 secondary schools and although we did some English grammar I cannot remember it featuring very highly in lessons in any of my schools. Certainly no parsing of sentences.

Where I did learn grammar and verb tenses was studying languages, mainly Latin although we did study grammar in French lessons as well.

However I have always been able to write clearly and grammatically and I spent a significant part of my working life either writing for publication or editing other people's work for publication. I do it still.

Welshwife, I left school in 1956. We also did parsing - and had a different colour for the different parts of the sentence, and then went on to use the same colours for clauses. To this day, I still think of verbs as red, nouns as green, pronouns were dotted green, adjectives as yellow, etc. etc.

One text-book which I remember from junior school is 'First Aid in English'. Is it still published today? If not, then perhaps it should be.

I agree with M0nica that the terminology for grammar used in schools now is different to that which we were taught - and I think is unnecessarily complicated for primary school children.