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[wangdaning]

I am not sure what is going on with this thread anymore. Passives are now easier than conjugation?

Text spelling and grammar have their place in text messages. It makes sense. Otherwise, it is a sign of ignorance. When these young native speakers take their exams and enter the real world, they are going to find the harsh reality that it makes them sound stupid.

As far as language acquisition is concerned, children do not naturally know what is correct/incorrect. I carried plenty of my parents linguistic inaccuracies with me for years. I remember being mocked for saying wa(r)sh instead of wash. I quickly corrected, as I would today, but I never saw anything wrong before being mocked.

Whether native speakers or ESL students, I still stand by my statement that the biggest issue here is laziness. The time and effort it takes to understand a language is too much for most.

I have studied both Spanish (in high school) and Chinese (university), and it was completely obvious who was putting in the time as far as reading, listening, speaking and writing. The lazy one's have no chance. Studying a language takes time, and many students are not willing to put in any time.

[Teacher in Rome]

[johnslat]

Dear Teacher in Rome,

First of all, thank you for being so good-natured about my smarminess.

As I mentioned, I've taught ESL to young children (three to five year olds,) so I have to tell you that this statement doesn't match my experience:

"Because if you say something that is incorrect, like "rats-catcher" a child will say "no, rat-catcher"."

Are you writing about "native speaker" children (although I've never been present when one of them made such a correction, either?)

Regards,
John

[wangdaning]

[Teacher in Rome]

Hi John

Yes, talking about native speaker children.

It would be interesting if anyone could fish out some research about what NS and NNS students learn. The order, the ease of acquisition, and so on.

As I've been saying - Chomsky's idea is that there's a universal grammar, which enables NS children to know if something's correct or not. (But they can't necessarily articulate this.) The "rats-catcher" is just an example. This because children are exposed to all sorts of language - correct and incorrect - but they STILL end up knowing the grammar - even if not taught the right stuff. (This is what threw behaviourism theories of lang acquisition out the window.)

And I'm saying that I see this sort of learning curve with ESL students. They don't always acquire what we think of simple grammar (i.e. third person s) early on. As another poster has suggested, maybe because this doesn't convey meaning. So my original point was that it's a waste of breath trying to insist on something that students aren't ready to learn.

And at this point, I'm going to back out of the discussion. If anyone's interested, I'm sure a bit of googling will turn up much more learned reasoning than I'm able to provide!

Thanks for all the comments and feedback - most interesting thread!

[Glenski]