Stop Teaching Kids Grammar
Sue me, Curriculum Development Center.
Many moons ago, much many much moons ago, actually, I was a kid, like you were a kid. And you were taught grammar. They made you regurgitate rules that did not make any sense.
For instance, if you have ever learnt Nepali, Hindi or similar languages, you must remember the phrase karak ra/aur bibhakti. Do you remember what you learnt? Did your teacher make you memorize it through musical mnemonics? Le baata prathama, laai kana dwitiya, le bata dwaara tritiya…
It’s a pretty useful linguistic tool for advanced learners. But not for someone aged twelve trying to study hundreds of other things, mostly not-so-useful.
Karak describes the functional role of a noun. Bibhakti is the case marking. See, still you don’t really understand what they are and yet you can fluently speak languages that use karak and bibhakti (like most languages in the world).
We should, therefore, move towards making kids acquire a language, rather than learn it.
Think of a kid. The kid is a small being with a small brain but with a humongous linguistic capacity. The kid’s family speaks Language X. The kid never reads a textbook. The kid never memorizes grammar rules. The kid starts cooing, then blabbering. The blabber turns into meaningful words. Then phrases. Then sentences. The kid makes mistakes, but the kid is not scared of making mistakes. Adults around the kid generally don’t care about such mistakes. The adults keep on talking, the kid keeps on acquiring new information. Within a few years, the kid becomes a fluent speaker of a language.
If kids can be fluent in a language in such an extraordinarily short amount of time, should we not be learning from them? Shouldn’t our second/third/forth language acquisition happen in a similar manner? Why should we care about karak and bibhakti as a non-linguist/non-adult-learner?
How can we move forward then?
Simple.
Our curriculum developers need to either retrain themselves or quit their job and leave it to someone who has actually studied modern linguistics. Someone who understands that input-based learning coupled with mistake-making-as-normal is how a language is acquired. You can’t really ‘score’ such learning. Language is a vast, vast never-ending, infinity-grossing entity. Who is a better language learner? One really cannot tell. One can only encourage curiosity and become a good instructor.
I rest my case here. If my young cousins come to me crying that they can’t memorize karak and bibhakti, I will write them a story about why karak and bibhakti is useless. They will see themselves in the story, they will laugh, they will think their teacher is not really a teacher, and they will learn more things about the language than they ever did in their useless grammar class.
