Q re national curriculum - conditional tense English language

I already gave you mine. Labov.

@lightlights
I haven't got any sources, just that by living and experiencing multiple other cultures you tend to get a sense of some of the subtle differences in cultures and learn more about your own. So yes, this is my opinion of a reason why certain things are done differently .

It's a bit like asking why the British have somewhat lost their tradition cuisine and society doesn't deem it important in their sense of identity. Why we feel that's it's fine to cook a mismatch of food, influenced from all parts of the globe, but don't see the need to preserve our own.

I know that there a host of reasons as to why this has happened, but at least a small part of the reason is that "people" don't feel or didn't feel strongly enough about it to prevent it happening.

In my opinion a similar thing is happening here. The amount of people who feel that attempting to slow the changes to our language is of extreme importance is not that high, or not high enough to police it to a great extent. Together with the fact that as others have said we are only one of the countries where English the official language and therefore wouldn't have the right to police what is taught in other sovereign lands.

Another linguist here- so many of us!

Hardly a linguist - just an English speaker 😁

Another linguist here- so many of us!- although I do semantics/pragmatics and so am not going to join in the debate about tenses 😂

OP, I think you are mixing up a few different things- grammar (in the sense of what linguists study- descriptive), grammar (taught at school- often prescriptive). For linguists, the idea of "correct grammar" is a bit meaningless- if the theory doesn't fit what native speakers actually say then the theory is wrong. That doesn't mean that no linguist supports any degree of prescriptive teaching in schools, just that we are doing different things. Clearly there are circumstances in which a speaker might be disadvantaged by using a non-prestige dialect. Whether the solution to that is to deem non-prestige dialects "incorrect" is as much a political question as a question of language.

When linguists use the term "formal grammar" they are not usually talking about traditional grammar or people being taught to speak in a formal way but about the underlying syntactic structures that govern how sentences are generated.

Would add that the existence of the Académie française doesn't mean that there aren't native French speakers using a variety of dialects and different forms of grammar, many of which the Académie française would deem incorrect 🙂 It is very much the King Cnut of cultural institutions.

Alright OP, let’s play sources.
You keep talking about ´academic sources’ - I want to know who/what your academic sources are?

All serious linguists who study English are all quick to point out that there is no one "right way" to "do" the language. This is blatantly obvious when one considers both the origins of the language and the fact that we have two major anglophone countries that have different spellings and grammatical conventions. Trying to impose an English Academy simply would not work and I'll be honest from the French speakers I know it doesn't actually work that well in France (and that is before we get to all the other places that speak French in the diaspora).

What we need to begin to teach our children is to give them a proper toolkit that allows them to begin to adapt their style to different forms of verbal and written communication. There is some attempt at this in the NC, but, based on what my children are doing and have done, it seems quite partial and focussed only on certain types of communication that perhaps betray the biases of those drawing up the curriculum (too much focus on media/content type writing rather than other forms). Of course you can't cover all styles and some styles are so specialised that they really don't get fully developed until the beginnings of a professional career. Certainly I have to spend plenty of time with new graduates honing their technical writing skills when they first begin their careers.

Yes, I think both attitudes are present at the same time, sometimes within the same individuals. So the académie française is considered the authority on correct usage, but people don’t necessarily feel they need to speak or write ´correctly’ all the time. And obviously, different people have different opinions on these things.

First time I went, they were having a regular purge. Apparently. The one which tickled me was "aeroglisseur" for hovercraft .. rather childishly I wondered if any eels were involved.

There’s always going to be overlap between forms. So at any one time there may be multiple grammatical constructions that are used to express the same thing. And over time the constructions will be considered more or less formal, more or less correct or modern or archaic.
You’re still really hanging onto this need for an exterior authority to validate ´correct’ and ´incorrect’ language use. In real everyday life it doesn’t work like that. Sure you can teach grammar in schools, but we mostly learn how to speak our first language or the majority language in our community from family and from peers. Forms you might consider ´incorrect’ because they have not been codified in formal grammar teaching books still have systemic usage and clear meaning for the people who use them within their speech community. Seriously, do look up William Labov. He’s an American sociolinguistic who did a lot of work in the 60s and 70s on different varieties of English in the United States. He worked with African American communities and wrote about how non standard grammatical forms used in their speech have meaning and are not incorrect versions of standard English but part of their own system. Labov is generally considered required reading for any linguistics student.

@lightlights
The point posters have been trying to make is that culturally having an official body which polices language doesn't sit as well in the UK as it does in some other countries, France could be an example, but also Italy, Germany, I don't know. It's probably something to do with how each country expresses its values, but also to do with what it takes to ensure the functioning of society.

This doesn't mean that people in professional jobs in the UK don't know how to use English, or that it isn't right to teach it to our children, but that there's something about the UK culture that has meant that this type of regulation hasn't been seen to be needed. It hasn't been seen as important enough to deem it necessary, for whatever reason.

It's a bit like the fact that the UK doesn't have or wish to introduce ID cards. Other countries find it extremely difficult to understand how it's possible to function without, yet it is clearly is possible.

I'm not saying that children shouldn't be taught English grammar, but every language is different and English is one of those languages where the average ability child actually doesn't need that much time to be able to reach a certain standard, compared to the average French or Italian child say. These languages have a written component that is rarely heard in spoken language and therefore are learnt off by heart. Children from around 8/9 spend hours learning hundreds of conjugations. Not so they can speak but so they can understand and produce written text. This is generally unnecessary in English, especially if you read.
I imagine children learning languages such as Chinese will spend even longer from a younger age.

English children spend hours learning to spell, because it's a difficult aspect of our language, and skills such as dictation could take years. Italian children can learn to write simple texts within a few months of not even knowing the alphabet, but generally won't be able to use language such as the past historical tense without years of studying by heart.

I thought a national pastime of the French was to extend deux doights to the académie ?

Have you ever read any William Labov OP?

OP you have acknowledged you are neither an EFL nor a linguistics specialist on this thread but you have then went on to disagree with every person who has said they are qualified in these areas. That’s why I stopped replying and why I didn’t feel the need to respond to your queries about what I meant by being a ‘linguist’. Great to chat about linguistics and different view points and people have taken the time to discuss at length what you are interested in. I disengaged because it has started to just feel a bit like you asking people to share their knowledge on a topic to then just say actually no that’s wrong.

You’re assuming I don’t understand that ´I’ is the subject pronoun so ´Me and my sister like black coffee’ should be wrong because you can’t say ´me like black coffee’. Of course I understand that.
My point though is that grammar rules are supposed to reflect actual usage. ´Me and my sister like black coffee’ is such a common construction in spoken English that I think we should be creating grammatical explanations (rules) to account for it rather than tell people they shouldn’t say it.
I haven’t done a survey, but in my experience English speakers are shocked that France has an academie française and French speakers are shocked that English doesn’t have an equivalent.