Did YOU learn English grammar at school? Me no.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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 a girls' private school in London - on an old LCC scholarship, I hasten to add, as no way could my parents have afforded fees.

I was taught English grammar superbly and lapped it up: parts of speech, clause analysis the lot! I later did a postgraduate course in Linguistics as I love everything about language.

But for our three daughters it was very different. One went to an otherwise very good Grammar school, where she was taught no grammar. I gave her and a friend a crash course before A level. The oldest did three years at a state school and didn't know the French for "and." With family help, we pulled her out and put her into a small fee-paying school, where the youngest also went for fve years. It was a struggle but the local State secondaries where we lived in London were pretty dreadful. I'm sure they have improved now.

The oldest daughter is a published writer but I still have to correct her punctuation - she has no idea how to use a semi-colon. The youngest does a lot of journalism and blogging and writes well.

But it's all hit and miss isn't it? Maybe I should run an online course in Grammar for Gransnetters! There are all sorts of things I can't do that you can, like riding a bicycle but I do know grammar and punctuation.

I went to my Grammar School in 1963 and remember learning all about the parts of speech and parsing in my English Language lessons. I also had a good grounding in punctuation throughout my schooling and spelling mistakes often had to be rewritten correctly 3 times. I was therefore horrified last week to receive an email about school photos from my GDs Deputy Head as follow:-
"Due to our growing student numbers, we will be taking the photo’s over two days, Year’s 7 to 11 will be taken on Wednesday and Year’s 12 & 13 will be taken on Thursday."
I am tempted to print a copy, correct it in red pen and return it to the same teacher OR should I simply send her some internet links on how to use apostrophes?
This is not the first email with similar mistakes which has been sent home recently! I despair!!

I learned grammar at both my primary and grammar schools. English Language was a separate lesson as well as exam. We called splitting the parts of a sentence 'Analysis' though my boarding-school books from the library taught me it could be called parsing. Weird word. No idea where it comes from.

Some sentences could fill a page of an exercise book when words and clauses were written in boxes with a tree layout in pencil ruled carefully to the subject and verb.

I have always found it useful to picture that structure. It helped when moving on to French and Latin.

I once copied and marked a primary school story of DD's when I was frustrated that her teacher had ignored three different spellings of the same word, clumps of words which were not sentences, and no paragraphing at all. The teacher said, 'but all that red looks messy and is discouraging.'

When the Literacy Hour was introduced, training for a whole generation of teachers was set up, so they would know what they were supposed to be teaching. Several told me how interesting it was!

Coming up to 'O' level, we were told to master the parsing bit - if we did, we would have an easy way to ensure that we had enough marks to pass. So an weekly class on this alone, breakinig down and describing adjectival clauses, adverbial modes etc. I found it boring and hard, but, sure enough, I got a good pass. BTW, the subjunctive is the tense used where there is a doubt, e.g. "If I were to go to town tomorrow, I could buy a new dress". Hope that helps.

In the 50s I was taught very traditionally - parsing, analysis, etc. I have found this useful whilst learning German for the past three years. When my daugher, a teacher of French and Spanish, first taught she was very surprised at her pupils' lack of even basic grammar in English. In the 70s she had been taught grammar, so it was still "around" then.
Giulia I was surprised to read what you said about the subjunctive in Italian. It seems pretty straightforward to me, while we seem to have dropped its use, or only use it in some instances.
My big struggle with German is knowing the gender because it governs other parts of a sentence as well. Wish I'd learnt it at school because these days very little sticks, sadly.

I agree about the importance of communication VQ. I think knowledge of the structure of language is important, but I have no problem with a sentence starting with so or a split infinitive such as "she used to secretly admire him" if it clarifies what is being said or written.
I do use semi-colons. I used to write lots of reports with limited word count and semi-colons save words.
I firmly believe that you learn to write by writing.

'Nice' a perfectly servicable word somehow rendered beyond the pale by the grammar Nazis who gave me no reason just made that word unacceptable......almost as bad as the other N word now.

I went to a comprehensive secondary school. It was a time when the powers that be decided that expression was more important than knowing the ins and outs of grammar. We learned to write in sentences but didn't have to be able to name each part. My English Language education was more about being able to use the language to communicate. We learned the basics of punctuation, tense etc. but we didn't go into it in an great detail. It was learning by doing rather than direct teaching. I think I'm pretty literate. I don't use colons and semi-colons very often but then who does?

"Splitting an infinitive and starting a sentence with “so” or “like” are all habits that any self-respecting grammar pedant would abhor.
"But a new study has found that conventions which prohibit such practises are so widely flouted, they have effectively become part of modern spoken English.
"Researchers have suggested that teachers no longer need to advise pupils against splitting infinitives or starting sentences with “so” or “like”, since they are now in common parlance."
What business it is of "researchers" (usually from some tin pot university) to suggest that teachers should water down our language by ignoring the rules of grammar and proper English usage, to the extent that the young grow up eventually speaking - and perhaps more importantly, writing - some sort of mongrel version of English that obeys no rules at all. It is a slippery slope.

I agree about the complexity of the grammar that is now taught in English primary schools anno.
Anyone for a fronted adverbial?

No, I wasn't taught English grammar at school (Midlands 1970's) but my Scottish DH was. I went on to study Law at Uni and whilst I had a good career (non legal), it would have been useful to have had the background knowledge.

Grammar was taught from Primary school when I was a child and continued in a great deal more depth in Grammar School .

It was a key focus and English lessons were either English Literature or English Language. I think it stood me in good stead during my career. As I often said to my girls, as long as you know the rules of grammar you don't have to use them unless the occasion demands :-)

I don't tend to dwell on the subjunctive in English apart from phrases like "be that as it may" and "if I were you".

I don't think English is simpler giulia. I don't know about Italian, but I teach English to adult learners in France and I think the conditionals are much harder than in French. Modal verbs are another example.
I did learn grammar at school and then taught English in schools for many years, but I have had to do a lot of work to get on top of the grammar for TEFL (and am still learning).

witzend - as regards the third conditional: "if I HAD WON the lottery, I WOULD HAVE TRAVELLED round the world" the poor Italians have to use the subjunctive form. This needs a lot of memorising and many never get to learn it. English is much simpler and they appreciate the fact!

At infants/junior school in a fairly working class area of outer London we very systematically learned the basics of reading, writing, punctuation and spelling. Every morning we used children's dictionaries to do a number of different exercises.

I don't remember learning any English grammar at all at my secondary modern school. However, I believe my grammar is fairly good, although I don't know all the technical terms for parts of sentences. I think it makes it much easier to know the proper terms when learning another language or teaching someone else to speak English.

When I look at my copy of our old school magazine, I feel that, although the education I received at my secondary modern school was quite limited, at least we were taught how to write well. Some of the articles were extremely well written.

TrishaF, I enjoyed Latin too. I did it to A Level and now tackle the Times Latin crossword every Saturday.

We were taught English grammar pretty well, I think, but I think I learned an awful lot more from the foreign languages I did at school - Latin, French, German, and for the final 3 years, Russian.

I later taught English as a Foreign Language, mainly to speakers of Arabic, and this was a whole new thing again. As a native speaker you don't have to learn the rules for your own language - you absorb the vast majority of them naturally. (I don't mean the things pedants like me get worked up about, like 'should of' instead of 'should have', but just the way the everyday language works.). Our 'bible' as teachers of EFL was a grammar for the purpose - a very different thing from a grammar for native speakers.

When I once had to take someone else's higher level class, I had to teach them 'the third conditional'. Although I had completed a very well regarded TEFL course I still hadn't the faintest idea what that was until I. looked it up in my 'bible', when I realised that it was something we use every day, but is quite complicated tense-wise for the poor old learners.

No - I don't usually say everything three times! Sorry about this. Sometimes my laptop runs amok.