Should grammar be taught to native English speakers in the same way as it is taught to people learning English as a second language?

Answer 1

No, grammar usually can not be taught to native speakers in the same way it is taught to second language learners. This is because ESL students often make different kinds of mistakes than native speakers. For example, ESL students often get confused between the words "fun" and "funny", "scary" and "scared", and "mail" and "letter." Native students generally do not have a problem differentiating between these words. Also, native students may make different kinds of mistakes depending on where they are from and what kind of accent they have. For example, I usually wouldn't use the word "ain't" in my writing or speaking because I am from an area of the country that doesn't use that word too much other than as a grammatical joke. Down South, it seems like people use "ain't" more often.

One would think that you could teach nouns, verbs, adjectives, and etc the same way, but again there are some differences because languages do not use the same word order. In English, the subject usually comes first, then the verb, and finally the object, but in other languages it can be the opposite. ESL students can benefit from a lot of sentence structure study and unscrambling sentence activities, especially if their native language has a different word order than English. Native speakers may need some of that, but not as much.

All that being said, there are many activities out there that could be used for both groups, however, teachers have to add in different kinds of activities to help students with their individual needs. This is to be expected as almost all students (even if they are all native speakers) have individual strengths and weaknesses, which the teacher needs to recognize, polish, and give assistance.