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Encourage reading and writing first. Worry about grammar later. Do you teach babies the proper way to greet someone before their first word? No, you do not. You speak around them enough so they emulate what they hear. They begin speaking in incomprehensible baby talk and progress to sentences. It is the same with reading and writing. Read to children, teach them to read, and encourage them to read on their own. At the same time, teach them to write. If they are reading, they will try to emulate what they read. As they get better at writing, you can work on grammar and editing. This is why publishers have editors and writers don't do their own editing.
If you want to "go back to basics," then how much more basic can you get than teaching the written language in the same manner that you learned the spoken language?5/23/2008 8:52 AM CDT
I'd like to slap a sticker on that one.
If I had a sticker.
3 comments:
Gah. I'm reading through these now. I pegged all the ones you did for similar reasons!
But this one...argh.
Actually, this meme is pretty resilient. Humans are wired to do verbal language acquisition in a deep-brain structure way, and because of this, people claim that other kinds of "natural processing" must occur, as well. But there is no data to support that. This way babies learn to speak does not analogize to anything else. Not math, not science, not writing, not art, not music. not tying shoes.
"Do you teach babies the proper way to greet someone before their first word?"
Umm, well, lots of parents do teach babies how to greet people (or try anyway) before they learn how to talk:
Aunt Sally comes in; you pick up baby; you say "Here's Aunt Sally. Hi Aunt Sally. Can you wave hi to Aunt Sally? Hi! Hi!"
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