No, Bill is actually right. And in Taiwan, a lot of the kids have perfect mastery of the rules of English grammar and do well on written tests... but they have serious difficulty in conversational English.
On 7/5/07, Raul Miller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 7/5/07, Bill Harris <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Terrence Brannon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > When I taught English in Taiwan, I forced my students to learn to > > write and speak on the premise that those can control the active > > aspect of the language can read and listen with no problem. > > Is there a reason you didn't teach them grammar instead and let them > deduce how to write and speak from those first principles? Personally, I do not see any substantial conflict between teaching people grammar and teaching students to write and speak. This seems especially true for a language like english where many of the commonly used words have their own special grammatical rules. (For example, consider some of the differences between common [valid] uses of the prepositions "of" and "on"). -- Raul ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
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