To wonder if English can be self-taught through reading?

[mytartanscarf]

This is purely anecdotal but I would be interested in your thoughts.

My attendance at school was always patchy and I didn't really go in at all, much, in my GCSE years. However, I got A*s in my English and I'm fairly sure it's purely down to a love of reading.

I don't remember anybody ever teaching me about language, punctuation or grammar - I just picked it up. My dad had taught me to read by the time I started school.

I am just wondering if this is the exception or whether English, or rather writing and reading skills can be taught just by seeing models through reading? (I am not including English taught as a foreign language.) :)

I read lots and lots and I would say my grammar and vocabulary are pretty poor compared to a lot of people I know. I am quite 'common' my language is common and grammar is common especially when I speak. My written language is not too bad but not as it good as it should be for someone university educated.

I think, for some, people that it is how your parents spoke etc rather than schooling. I know some people who come from posher backgrounds than me who speak better, and therefore write better than me, despite having not achieved much academically.

I would be at the library at least twice a week, much to the annoyance of my mum, taking out 4 books a time plus doing the reading required at school. I have read some pretty hard core books and I still speak like I am pretty thick and would write like that too if I didn't check myself on it.

So in answer to your question for some people yes but others like me no. I now just read rubbish as its all my brain can take being a single parent and working 40 odd hours a week in 12 hours shifts

Its down to the individual how they learn.
You can tell someone til your blue in the face and they won't learn and then there's are people who pick certain things up with no conscious effort.

I think I'm rubbish at written English but I have always loved reading.

See the grammar in that last post proves my point

Yes, perhaps that is true and it is about how your parents speak as well :)

I think you can.

Yes I would say that reading is a key ingredient, without a doubt.

I read an astonishing amount when I was a kid, a book a night for a while. I think it's made my vocabulary larger and my awareness of sentence structure options better (depends what you read, obviously, not all books are created equal) but I didn't get the finer points of grammar or spoken English from a book - that came from being taught. It's not automatic though, I have to work hard to put a really good sentence together.

English is a funny old thing. It's my only language (sadly), and I love it, but it's a pain. Too many options and not enough rules can cause problems!

The thing is, Jane Austin's English is incorrect by today's usage but I do think that for a wide vocabulary, books are the way to go. There are also problems with regards to pronunciation. Here is a semi famous poem about pronunciation.

I take it you already know
of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you
on hiccough, thorough, slough and through.
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?

Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird.
And dead; it's said like bed, not bead.
For goodness sake, don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat,
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt)

A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother.
And here is not a match for there,
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear,
And then there's dose and rose and lose --
Just look them up -- and goose and choose,

And cork and work and card and ward
And font and front and word and sword.
And do and go and thwart and cart --
Come, come, I've hardly made a start.
A dreadful language? Man alive,
I mastered it when I was five.

i don't think reading would help with grammar, mine is atrocious but i do think it would help with vocabulary. in order to use a wide range of words you first must discover them in some way, either through people around your or through literature.

I think a certain amount can be learnt through reading, beyond that most people probably need some instruction.

I had very patchy school attendance, can't remember being taught any grammar, but I must have picked up some, as I had enough to write passable essays in science subjects (where perhaps it didn't matter whether you used commas or full stops in the right places all the time, so long as the facts were there).

The level of my writing often annoys me, as I'm aware it doesn't always read back well. I google anything I'm not sure of, eg effect/affect, bear/bare, but I'll probably never be able to use a semi-colon correctly!

This is what I find interesting, as I have never explicitly been taught anything about grammar but nonetheless use it correctly. I just have no idea why it is correct!

I often mispronounce things even to this day!

I'm sure you were taught grammar. In English it's mostly via parental correction though. Our grammar falls into two categories - vague and squabbled over (split infinitives etc) and very clear (you would never put the verb at the end of the sentence German style). The key points tend to get explained by your parents, although not as "grammar".

Good Lord, Jane Austen never wrote a sentence she thought was too long.

Paragraph long sentences. Painful to read!

I do agree with op, often grammar is taught in such a way that people know what is correct in a certain context but not why. So the grammar "rule" cannot be used correctly across the board.

The English teachers at my high school taught us the art of the "hanging apostrophe" rather than how to use them correctly

Was anyone ever taught the names of tenses, what's a direct object etc? I never was when I was at school in the late 1980s/early 90s. I'm trying to learn a second language and it's kind of expected by my tutor that I know all this . My spelling and grammar are usually pretty good, but I just don't have a clue about the proper terms for parts of a sentence (apart from just the basic what's a noun, verb, adjective and adverb). Wouldn't know the past progressive if it bit me on the bum!

tanukiton thanks, nice reading for someone whose first language is not English.

To answer OP - yes, I believe reading is the most important. It improved my Russian and later Estonian. I'm hoping it will improve my English as well.

Definitely possible, but depends on the person. I was largely self-taught when it came to English and just "picked it up" from reading, but then I'm weird. Most people probably need explicit instruction if you want them to be able to do things like punctuate properly and construct an essay. Education systems should be based on the assumption that these things need to be taught, otherwise a lot of people will never achieve their potential.

I have never explicitly been taught anything about grammar but nonetheless use it correctly.

That's the same for every child learning its mother tongue and most of it will be from parents correcting errors.

You might not think about it, but telling your child the dog ran after the ball rather than runned after it - that's how children learn language. But they have already learnt enough by that point to be able to apply a regular past tense ending to a verb - most English verbs (doing words) do take -ed on the end to become past tense, just like most nouns (naming words) take an -s in the end to become plural. As parents or teachers, we just tell the child what the actual word is when it's an irregular form like ran or sheep.

Children have a particular ability for language acquisition when young, and that's when they learn most of the grammar, even if they are never taught the words for describing it. All of us know what sounds right in our native tongue, at least for every day use; more specialist or advanced vocabulary needs to be learnt, and reading can help there.

(I was at school during the '80s, and I was taught about the parts of speech, subject, object, indirect object and so on. I learnt a lot more about grammar by doing foreign languages - stuff like the subjunctive - but I definitely did it as part of English lessons. I seem to be almost unique among my generation for that.)

It would be incredibly rare for a secondary school student to pass a GCSE at A - A* without being taught, such are the specifications nowadays. Even if you take out the element of controlled assessment (which will be gone soon) it's not about grammar and punctuation anymore - yes, there are elements of this within the writing section, but the reading section is all about analysis for which students have to be trained.

If you go on some of the exam board websites you can download past papers, the questions always seem pretty straight forward but then if you look at the mark schemes you'll see that it's all about how to communicate the response, which is bloody difficult to do with no training.

With regards to teaching yourself literacy, then I think this is highly possible because language is innate. But don't confuse English with Literacy or functional English they are not the same thing.

Yes, but not using Fifty Shades.

As an English tutor who has to fill in the gaps in education, I can say a big no to this one. I have had some fantastically bright and committed students - week-read A level students - who have no understanding about when and why to use an apostrophe. Another issue is knowing when and why to use commas: so many of them think it's just for a pause when you fancy one. They don't understand that there are certain rules around introductory phrases and subordinate clauses etc. Many also confuse 'although' with discourse markers such as 'however', so they write "Although, I disagree..." Oh, and then there's comfusing the possessive its and the contraction it's, which mean two totally different things!

I also lecture at university and the standard of writing varies wildly from beautifully written prose that is a pleasure to read - almost art itself - to essays so poorly constructed that I have to read sentences or paragraphs two or three times to try and work out what on earth the student is trying to say.

Also, 'would of' (could, should, etc.) has emerged from children learning through hearing: most people say would've, which is pronounced almost the same as would of. As apostrophe usage is so rarely taught thoroughly, children's understanding of the construction tends to be based on sound alone.

As an English teacher I would say reading is one of the biggest factors, if not the biggest, especially for the impact it has on pupils' vocabulary and therefore their own writing. However, pupils would need instruction on how to respond to texts, as there is a formula required (using quotations/analysing them etc) that they are not going to magically know just by reading.

Knowledge of punctuation and grammar can certainly be absorbed by reading - that is how I learnt as when I was at school there was no explicit teaching of it. However, my parents spoke 'proper' and, every now and then my mother would discover I wasn't sure about apostrophes, for example, and do a bit of drilling at home. This was by no means a regular thing though.

I expect most, if not all English teachers have had the experience of teaching an aspect of grammar or punctuation and for pupils to 'know' it. Making the leap to being able to use it spontaneously in their own writing is another matter all together. Ime, the pupils with the best grammar are those who read and/or are surrounded by positive models at home.

Reading certainly helps - it's necessary but not sufficient.

My children are bilingual, attend a French school, did not have formal English lessons until secondary school. Nevertheless, my 13 year old has flawless written English and has done for as long as I remember - she will do english iGCSE next year (as an independent candidate) which I have no doubt she will pass. She has always been an avid reader and she writes a lot too, for pleasure.

Doesn't work for everyone though (otherwise teachers would be out of business). Her younger brother who has just turned 12 and it's only really in the last year or so that his English spelling has improved. He reads a lot too.

DD didn't need teaching to write in French either (it's a harder language to write) so I guess there is just a subset of people who have a certain aptitude for language and for whom reading is enough. I wouldn't want to generalize that statement though - I think most kids need to learn rules in order to spell and write well.

Definitely varies from person to person. I come from the Generation Who Didn't Do Grammar, and just picked it all up through voracious reading. Still can't label the chunks of a sentence to save my life but nobody's ever taken issue with my writing. (Sentences often too long and involved and hyphens overused, but those are stylistic idiosyncrasies rather than actual errors - I'm with Jane Austen on them).

But having learned spelling entirely through osmosis, and watched DD do the same I'm now startled to find that DS, who reads just as much as either of us, frequently spells words wrongly! He's actually an average to good speller for a ten year old (shown up by an overambitious choice of vocabulary) but I'm surprised to see him getting words wrong at all because surely he should just know what they look like

Clearly this is a) smug and b) fatally lacking in imagination but I genuinely didn't understand about the concept of learning how to spell words and it's still a bit of a mystery to me. Good job I'm not an English teacher; I'd be crap.

.....or should that be ": I'd be crap"? Exercise for the reader.