[Symbiote]

Do 14 year olds in the USA know what "gerund" means?

I didn't know terms like that in England in the 2000s, though I picked them up from learning other foreign languages later.

I have heard university professors complain that they can say, simply, "rephrase the paper into the active voice" to a student from <anywhere else>, but many British students don't know what that means.

England now teaches more grammar, but it is not much use generalizing from individual experiences of a particular state/country in a particular decade.

[brightly-salty]

No, I don’t think most 14-year-olds in the USA would know what a gerund is, but most of them would know active versus passive voice. Maybe the kids in advanced or hobbies classes, though. (Speaking as an American high school student)

[Teknoman117]

Yes, we were taught what a gerund _is_, but I never had a teacher who actually called it that.

[cafard]

I did, but because of Latin class, not because of English class.