Q re national curriculum - conditional tense English language

I feel the same about German. We were taught no English grammar at all at my comp. When we started learning German the teacher was baffled by our lack of knowledge. She had to start from scratch. Was so useful. I'm not great at grammar, but I do enjoy trying to sort it out.

OP, I have never heard of zero conditional and would have thought 1st and 2nd conditionals referred to 1st and 2nd person but have just learned otherwise.

Yes I don't remember being taught this at school and I suspect it's because they sounded obviously different in that specific part of the country. I now teach in an area where the accent is different to my own and find the homophone errors fascinating. Our and are sound very different when I say them but are frequently confused. I quite often have to teach lists of homophones which are definitely not homophones to me!

I think you’re misunderstanding the descriptivist point of view.
I’m not actually against teaching kids standard English grammar.
What I am against, is telling kids the way they speak is wrong or nonsensical or ungrammatical. There is always a grammatical system even when it’s different to the system held up as the standard. Even within communities who speak something close to standard English, written grammar and spoken grammar are not the same. Try transcribing audio recordings of things like TED talks and interviews and conversations if you need an illustration.
We should be teaching basic sociolinguistic principles in schools alongside standard English grammar. It’s good for kids who speak non-standard varieties to know that they are learning to be bi or multi-dialectal. If they end up being a lawyer one day they will use one kind of English in the court room and in legal written work and another kind of English when they see their family. That doesn’t mean their is something wrong with the way they speak with their family.

I would bet money that the rate of your/you’re spelling confusion is lower in a population who pronounce them differently, yes.

Certainly I have to spend plenty of time with new graduates honing their technical writing skills when they first begin their careers.

Even past that. I'm a scientist currently doing a professional course in an area I work in, but that is law- rather than science-focussed. I'm being told I don't signpost enough in my assessments. The problem is that what they call "signposting" is what I've been trained into thinking of as unnecessary waffle!

Because ´your’ and you’re’ sound identical.

It actually doesn't where I am! "You're" sounds like "ewer". It would be interesting to know whether fewer people make that mistake here.

@PrincessTeaSet
I made the point about national cuisine, not to say that we don't have one, but that we culturally are extremely quick to open up to new cuisines from all over the globe and to be honest I don't think that there will be a large proportion of people under the age of say 50 who eat in the same way as their parents did. This is in stark contrast to many other cultures where aside from the odd burger and fries the majority of people still eat traditional food, as did their parents.

I was trying to show how I think that some cultures are less open or at least quicker to change habits and the UK is generally one of the quicker ones. There are many other examples and these were to answer the OP when she asked why I thought the UK wouldn't appreciate a national policing of grammar.

The education system in the Uk tends to channel "the right" people into different areas of work or further education rather than a basic standard of knowledge and competence that as a nation we should acquire. It matters more that we get the right people doing the right things and not whether all of these people have reached a certain level.

Other countries make other decisions on how they educate their population. I am in no way saying that teaching and enforcing standard grammar is not beneficial to students, but I suspect that many families and educators wouldn't be in agreement with the methods that many countries use to achieve these standards.
The hours of homework a night, rote learning, completing and rewriting 100's of complex grammatical structures into workbooks. Sitting in individual desks in silence in class and doing pages of dictation so that these skills can be monitored without parental intervention.
I'm not saying that these methods are right or that they couldn't be modernised but a change in method and priority would be needed if we want all children, independent of family background and language of origin to reach a certain standard.

As a nation would everyone agree that it was worth it, or would they say that actually, by insisting so much on one aspect then all children are missing out on a wider range of educational opportunities?

Our national cuisine? Not sure what you mean there but full English breakfast, fish and chips, Cornish pasty, roast dinner, toad in the hole, Scouse, cream tea, cups of tea, etc plus many regional specialities are very much preserved and valued. If you don't agree just go abroad to Spanish resorts and see the number of restaurants serving traditional British cuisine.

I think the OP is a bit pedantic but agree with her very much that it is elitist to not bother teaching grammar to children and expect them to pick it up at home or by reading. It just serves to widen the divide. These threads always attract people who say "I never learned grammar and now I have a PhD in English and am the editor of the Times", conveniently imagining their ability with English fell out of the sky and didn't come from growing up surrounded by well spoken people, having access to lots of books etc. For every one of these there are several others who left school unable to construct a sentence in their own native language. Just look on your local community Facebook page for evidence of this. It's all very well to argue that language changes and there are no fixed rules but in practice it's the rich who make the rules and if the poor don't stick to them it is a disadvantage throughout life. As OP said you won't find many doctors or lawyers saying "I have went" or "I could of".

You say "I don’t think many people really want an English equivalent of the académie française" - fascinating theory - why do you think that?

If you read the posts on MN you will see an awful lot of people wished they had been taught formal grammar at school. That isn't possible without some sort of sensible body - you are a linguist who thinks that "me and my sister" is perfectly fine - it isn't - it is incorrect and there are clear sensible reasons why (which I can give if you like). A regulatory body would be very helpful in this sort of discussion.

I'm surprised you disagree with the poster who said that people don't want an English version of the Académie Française. In my opinion the majority of people aren't remotely interested in grammar, even if they are aware that theirs isn't great. Most people would probably scoff at the idea of such a regulatory board and regard it as a stuffy anachronism.

I have been a foreign language teacher in English secondary schools for nearly 30 years and have also taught adults. I can of course see the value in teaching grammar from primary school age, not least because it makes my job a lot easier. However, most people's view is that they know how to speak English, so why study grammar?

You asked for a source to provide evidence that people wouldn't want an 'Académie Anglaise'. What is your source which shows that they would?

As an example

Agreed. Been teaching EFL / ESOL for 27 years. I can wing some lessons but no way would I walk into an IELTS academic or Cambridge C2 class. Serious prep needed.

No idea why you are being so rude about EFL OP, a lot of native speakers wouldn’t get through a C2 Cambridge exam.

Have a go at their Use of English paper, you might enjoy it! Especially Part 4 transformations. Then imagine teaching the grammar. Then come back and call EFL simplified 😉

I think it could definitely reduce intelligibility between different varieties of English, yes. But I also think it would be completely comprehensible within speech communities. I think grammar would change faster too.

https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/documents/2739/19-Memoirs-20-Palmer.pdf
Actually this biography (co-written by David Crystal) suggests that Palmer was the one who came up with the grammatical account of English verbs I described earlier, where tense refers only to past and present, and combines with aspect and the passive/active distinction and modal verbs such as ´will’ to form all the different verb forms we use in standard English.

The problem there would be regional accents.

F for TH, etc.

I know! I 've seen the Cambridge C1/ C2 and it's no walk in the park.

EFL teaching and resources are mainly very simplified

Have you seen the higher level IELTS material?

😂

It's a bit like asking why the British have somewhat lost their traditional cuisine

Ce n'est peut-être pas une perte ?

40 years of cyber communications has drilled into me not to fuss too much about spag online. It's not the Booker fucking Prize.

Throw in spearchuckers and now the creeping menace of "AI", and I can see written postings becoming far less intelligible (and therefore far more ambiguous) in the coming years.

And that's before you factor in Muphrys's Law

I haven’t checked but this was probably me.
I mean, you know why this is a super frequent error right? Because ´your’ and you’re’ sound identical.
I have an interesting thought experiment for you; what would happen if we got rid of all the spelling distinctions in French (or English) that distinguish grammatical or lexical forms in written language but not spoken language?
If it helps you could imagine using phonetic symbols instead of the current orthographic systems so that in written language you would see all the sound differences that distinguish grammatical or lexical forms that can’t be seen in written language currently.