I'm not saying America does a stellar job of this (it doesn't), but at least a public school education includes grammar to the extent of differentiating a noun from, say, a verb. Australian Gen-Yers literally did not have grammar taught to them in schools. A handful picked up a handful of tips when they studied foreign languages (which, granted, is also how I fine-tuned a good bit of mine), but for a period of some years no one was actually taught any grammar in Australian schools.*
*Possibly this was only New South Wales and Victoria? My sources, I'll admit, are rather limited to these states.
Friday, October 29, 2010
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6 comments:
Sadly it fell out of fashion in Queensland too. I think the idea was that children would pick it up as they went along by hearing people talk or reading books. Sigh. I don't know if it's in the current curriculum.
Hi Kim Good chatting to you yesterday. What a wonderful blog! One could spend hours here! Keep up the great writing and I look forward to reading your travel book one day :)
My blog is at www.graemex.blogspot.com - it's more of a family and personal journal so not as interesting as yours. But have a look if you want.
cheers / G
hey graeme! thanks for coming and commenting! :) i'll have to check out your blog!
Not entirely true about the grammar, I believe they were trying to change how they were teaching it, making the terms simpler to understand, for example instead of verb 'doing word' but then they changed their minds again and it didn't happen. But I distinctly remember learning about doing words.
"Doing words"! Oh dear oh dear oh dear!! Those are called verbs!! Please tell me you were actually taught nouns and verbs and adjectives and adverbs and pronouns and prepositions and conjunctions and interjections!?
I probably was, maybe I just remember the simplified words better, nouns - things, adjectives - describing words, but i'm not entirely sure of what a conjucntion or an interjection is, and trying to think makes my head hurt. Maybe I'm just not a language person. Also I may just know what I was taught in infants school and not taught after really. And anyway it's not my fault that I wasn't taught properly!
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