There is a reasonable point to be made for the idea that consistancy is valuable. However, I'm not sure I buy your implication that a non-brain-damaged twelve-year-old has an imperfect understanding of semantics or "underlying structure," which I take to mean syntax. If these kids didn't have good syntax, they wouldn't reliably produce things exactly in line with adult speech, and you would expect them to misparse adult speech with some noticeable effect.
No such effect, to my knowledge, has been found.
In short: you can't teach language per se to kids. All you can do is try to teach them some of your language conventions, which may be worthwhile if you think your language is in some way superior to theirs, or if you want to enforce consistancy.
Does anyone else here have any training in linguistics? By the time someone's in the fifth grade, his grammar is utterly perfect. This prescriptivism has got to end; if it was for you people we'd all still be speaking old French. Nothing could possibly be less important than teaching kids when you think they should use "which" and when "that," etc. There is nothing wrong with language change, and the way it happens is that kids start speaking differently than their parents.
Spelling is only marginally more important, in so far as unconventional spelling loses information. But please, teach kids how to write in English class, not grammar "rules" that someone made up centuries ago.
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There is a reasonable point to be made for the idea that consistancy is valuable. However, I'm not sure I buy your implication that a non-brain-damaged twelve-year-old has an imperfect understanding of semantics or "underlying structure," which I take to mean syntax. If these kids didn't have good syntax, they wouldn't reliably produce things exactly in line with adult speech, and you would expect them to misparse adult speech with some noticeable effect. No such effect, to my knowledge, has been found.
In short: you can't teach language per se to kids. All you can do is try to teach them some of your language conventions, which may be worthwhile if you think your language is in some way superior to theirs, or if you want to enforce consistancy.
Does anyone else here have any training in linguistics? By the time someone's in the fifth grade, his grammar is utterly perfect. This prescriptivism has got to end; if it was for you people we'd all still be speaking old French. Nothing could possibly be less important than teaching kids when you think they should use "which" and when "that," etc. There is nothing wrong with language change, and the way it happens is that kids start speaking differently than their parents.
Spelling is only marginally more important, in so far as unconventional spelling loses information. But please, teach kids how to write in English class, not grammar "rules" that someone made up centuries ago.