Armand6:Can you explain how grammar skills like determining whether 'finding' is a deverbative noun, present participle or a gerund, can help your students to express themselves coherently and concisely? Grammar and eloquence are apples and oranges. In the Soviet school there were TONS of both English and Russian grammar, and what results it gave?

When you study linguistics, especially areas like discourse analysis or semantics, you gain a deep insight into the language and how words are chained to convey meaning. Learning to break down a language allows you to violate its rules, to manipulate it and write better. There are so many natives whose linguistic intuition is so bad that they fail to see the difference in something so simple as ‘I play the piano’ and ‘I play with a ball’, as a result, when they’re learning a foreign language where ‘play’ is translated differently in those two cases they are unable to express themselves properly and end up making mistakes in places they shouldn’t.

Understanding how a language works allows you to properly bend it to your will, which is something particularly useful when you want to be a good writer. In addition, words allow you to manipulate, not only can you see through the bullshit in, for instance, a political speech thanks to learning to be as exact as a physicist* (semantics and discourse analysis), but you can also learn to pick the exact words to properly convince someone. Knowing what to say and how to say it are particularly powerful skills which I think are greatly undervalued. In this sense, knowing how a language exactly works is akin to knowing how to forge the parts of a car and how they work together to make them move. It isn’t only about driving the car, but also about what makes it move.

*What I mean by this is that you can bypass the common embellishment used in speeches so that you can focus on the actual message. You can do it by learning how words work together and the exact meaning they convey; this is a particularly lethal tool for lawyers who like twisting words.

In a nutshell, I can tell you, a good foundation in grammar and/or linguistics allows to write better, to express yourself better, to understand context and learn any foreign language much faster. The study of one’s own language is greatly neglected in foreign language teaching, students learn a language much slower than they should because they are unable to properly do a syntactic analysis and understand the relation between words. I’m always scolding my students for not knowing how to even identify an adverb in a sentence! And yet they hope to actually learn a foreign language well enough to write essays or professionally translate.

Suzumiya:

Tempodivalse: I think this is part of a broader educational trend away from "humanities" and more towards "sciences".

It's always been like that, I believe. Very little importance is given to know how to write coherently, as a result, we have many doctors, engineers and many other professionals who can't write well, and this is something that happens in many languages/countries. The study of languages is always neglected because, after all, 'we already speak the language', yet many fail to efficiently use the main communication tool we posses: the language.

As an engineering student I had a mandatory writing class. I want to call it technical writing but I am not sure of the exact topic. It was actually the most useful English class I ever took because it offered great practical advice on writing clearly, and writing appropriately for your audience. I feel like every student, not just the technical students, could use such a practical writing class.

erinja:

As an engineering student I had a mandatory writing class. I want to call it technical writing but I am not sure of the exact topic. It was actually the most useful English class I ever took because it offered great practical advice on writing clearly, and writing appropriately for your audience. I feel like every student, not just the technical students, could use such a practical writing class.

That's very good! Though I don't think you fall into the majority, unless you tell me it is mandatory for all majors in American universities to teach students to write well, which I believe should be the norm everywhere.

Suzumiya:That's very good! Though I don't think you fall into the majority, unless you tell me it is mandatory for all majors in American universities to teach students to write well, which I believe should be the norm everywhere.

No idea. But I was a good writer before entering the class, and I did feel it improved my skills. For those who went into the class not as good writers - I am not sure whether a single semester in this class was enough to make a real difference.

Every school had its plusses and minuses with the curriculum. My school did not require students of technical subjects to study a language. I found this short-sighted.

I was an "English conversation" teacher in Japan for several years, and came across many people who had learned English for six years in school by rote memorization and complicated explanations of grammar... and who could barely speak a word of English. As in, I would say, "HOW ARE YOU?" and they would say "...eh?"

Personally, I like learning about grammar, and I don't mean to say that it's useless in teaching language. But spending too much time on grammar can be like teaching someone how to throw a ball by teaching them vectors and calculus.

The above is why even when native speakers of a language don't have a familiarity with grammar (even that of their own language), they still have a greater mastery than a foreign speaker. What they do have is a cultural capital and understanding that isn't acquired from grammar books; and isn't completely acquired from reading novels/newspapers or immersion either.

Educational level is no guarantee either.

Vestitor:What they do have is a cultural capital and understanding that isn't acquired from grammar books

... and which is necessary only for emigrants with their menial work, as they are required not to go on natives' nerves too much. International relationships are built on different principles and require professional skills over the conversational ones.

Armand6:

Tempodivalse:I so often cringe at the inability of students at my university to express themselves concisely and coherently.

Can you explain how grammar skills like determining whether 'finding' is a deverbative noun, present participle or a gerund, can help your students to express themselves coherently and concisely? Grammar and eloquence are apples and oranges. In the Soviet school there were TONS of both English and Russian grammar, and what results it gave?

So, I teach rhetoric. I tell my students the last thing I want them to do in a debate is to name a fallacy, especially the informal ones. We use them to talk about arguments, yes, but outside of that context I want them to explain the fallacy. I have a practical reason for this---most audiences haven't memorized the main fallacies. But I also feel that by explaining them, they become a counter-argument, a means to an end.

I bring this up in analogy to formal grammar. There are virtually no practical applications for formal grammar. The handful of exceptions---linguistics chief among them---stretch the meaning of practical quite a bit. But it is nearly indispensable for teaching people how to find and fix their mistakes and to know how to avoid them in the first place. Plenty of grammar is taught unmotivated, and in English this is especially a mistake since a good deal of the "rules" are Latin grammar incorrectly fitted to English. Learning that I is subjective but me is objective is not the end goal; knowing why saying "It was me" is formally wrong is useful. It is best explained by cases and parts of speech.

rikforto: in English ... a good deal of the "rules" are Latin grammar incorrectly fitted to English.

I always got a kick out of the 'don't split infinitives' rule imposed on English from Latin. It is not wrong to split infinitives in Latin, it's impossible! Silly academia. Not sure why they thought that that should have anything to do with English. Musta been the lead in the plumbing.

Not myself sold on the grammar argument for learning languages; it may help foreign language teachers teach grammar. If that's the goal - grand.

Fluency, though, comes from immersion. Even for stupid grown ups.