5 ms·

Then why teach grammar at all if we know kids pick it up naturally? There seems to be a threshold beyond grammer needs to be taught? Or was the hypothesis that

• accountface 10y ago
  There's a difference between formal and conversational grammar
• throwaway2048 10y ago
  you dont need to learn "grammar" in school/lessons to know how to speak a language.
• schoen 10y ago
  Language planning/standardization - ensuring prevalence of standard varieties of a language, suppressing non-standard varieties or at least letting people understand how and why they're non-standard (David Foster Wallace wrote a long piece about this in 2001 called "Tense Present" http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-2001-04-0070913.pdf http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-2001-0... and there's also a long story about nationalist movements trying to design, and teach, a standard prestige version of their national languages, which does require grammar instruction to create and maintain because it's somewhat different from all or most students' home language varieties) Written vs. spoken language - may have different grammatical norms Non-native speakers - want explicit instruction because they lack native-speaker intuition about some aspects of grammar Appreciating language intellectually - curiosity and appreciation about how your language works, independent of your ability to produce sentences other speakers accept as correct