How should a first language be taught?

Just read the Chinese paper this morning.

HK government has decided to scrap the grammar portion of the English O-level exam. OTOH, grammar will be taught as part of the first language curriculum, and not only that, native Chinese speakers will have to pass listening and oral to earn their O-level (HKCEE) diploma, and there will no longer be mandatory reading from Chinese classics.

hmmm, sounds like the first language is going to be taught like a second language.
Am I the only one confused?

There is almost a mini-revolution taking place, thanks to mobile phones and instant messaging. Kids are re-inventing the English language WUD U BELEEV IT!

And here. I read a while ago that in young people the thumb is actually becoming quite strong because of all the texting they do.

A propos of asolutely nothing, did you know that hearing loss is increasing in younger people because of exposure to loud music and personal stereos?

Are we seeing a further evolution of the species?

That is correct, Pieanne. I remeber that as well.

Hello Julie

I'm an English learner from Japan. One problem of our kids here is that they are not taught much about the grammar of Japanese, though they are forced to learn English grammar rather intensively. As the consequence, they tend to parse Japanese sentences by using the concepts of English grammar. For example, we say "watashi-wa ringo-ga suki-desu" to mean "I like apples". If I translate the Japanese sentence word-to-word wise, it should be "As for me, apples are likable". Here "watashi-wa" is an adverbial phrase to define the topical range of the main statement. "Ringo-ga" is the subject of the main statement, and "suki-desu" is a predicative adjective. But now most of young Japanese people don't take the sentence this way. They falsely take "watashi-wa" as the subject, and "ringo-ga" as the object of the verb "suki-desu". So their understanding Japanese grammar is completely wrong, but still they can speak Japanese very fluently, and most of them are too bad at speaking English.

paco