[chimpansteve]

Is English your first language? If it isn't, I completely agree with you.

However if it is, then I would make the argument that it's exactly the right way to teach it, particularly to young people. As you point out, it's a very fluid language with a lot of rules that are completely arbitrary. As a native speaker, it's more important getting to grips with the, I dunno what we'd call it on here, pseudocode rather than formulaic structure? Concepts over syntax maybe.

I'm from the UK. My immediate family is from Dundee and Sunderland. I had inlaws from Liverpool and Bristol. When we all got together, especially after a few drinks, at no point would an outsider think we were even speaking the same language, but we all had the same common grounding.

I agree with you that it's probably a bad way to teach formal grammar. It depends on the context though

[ryao]

English is my first language. However, I had an undiagnosed learning disability until college.

That said, to name one example, I do not think an understanding of adverbs versus adjectives can develop effectively if one is constantly exposed to people using adjectives as adverbs. It causes a loss of nuance that comes back to bite people, especially when it causes friction with those who know better. I remember in the 8th grade, we saw the play 1776, they were singing adverbs ending in -ly and I had no idea what the nuance was aside from the rhyming. I do not think many of my classmates did either.

The common defense of the status quo seems to be blind to the underlying problems in English education. The status quo is untenable since the issues with English literacy are now measurable.

[mrangle]

To be generous, what this meant is either that you were below the reading level for the book or you misunderstand the core skill of reading and using style in the English language. Reading and understanding when rules are broken leads to knowing when they can be. We don't skip Shakespeare because the language is funny and archaic. Reading these authors is both a part of style and content literacy for the English language. Disclaimer: I'm not comparing them.

[ryao]

There is a difference between understanding a book’s contents and being able to read the book without having it rewrite your understanding of the English language such that you have no idea what is correct and incorrect because your grasp on that was tenuous in the first place. Children are expected to avoid being rewritten at stages where they are extremely impressionable and are easily rewritten and then they are blamed for it. It is fairly sadistic thing to do to children.

[mrangle]

No, it's all a part of learning to read and understand language.

If a child is having that much trouble with it, which would be unusual at grade-level, then the book is above their level. At that point, the child should probably be screened for a delay.

How this generally works is that young people ingest these books, and by doing so their language ability increases to be able to flexibly understand (and use, if stylistically appropriate), non-standard grammatical forms.

[AngryData]

I don't know if I would agree that how we teach it now is really the best way, but I overall agree with you that in order to really learn english you need an extremely wide and varied exposure to english in order to learn all the "rule breaking" and make english across the world and through time intelligible.

[ryao]

People can learn this outside of school. People who learn English as a second language do. Forcing it on me as a child meant that I did not learn English properly, until well into my adulthood. I am a native speaker in my 30s and I am still finding faults in my English education that need correction. One of the most recent ones I have found is using “pet” as a past tense. The correct past tense is “petted”. If school had properly taught English without forcing me to read incorrectly written literature that confused me, I would not have been saying this wrongly for decades. Another issue in my English that I found in recent years was use of the word “wrong” where I should use “wrongly”. Adjectives are not adverbs. :/

[kccqzy]

Well colloquially "pet" itself is a past tense. Depends on the register of the language. And "wrong" is also an adverb. It would help if the educators explain when to use "wrong" vs "wrongly" vs "wrongfully" since all could be adverbs; or you could read enough to figure out the subtle differences.

[ryao]

I had recently looked up “wrong” to check out of curiosity, and DuckDuckGo only said it was an adjective, so I had stopped using it as an adverb. It turns out that the dictionary states it is an adverb, but you need to click to go to an actual dictionary to see that since the definition given by DuckDuckGo is only a partial definition. Thanks for making me double check.

That said, I read dozens of English books per year. I am well past the point of diminishing returns for benefits from more reading in English. Reading more books only increases my reading speed , which I have noticed is now 2 to 4 times faster than others around me.