Before you choose an English teacher, ask how they handle grammar

We've met several junior-high students — that's roughly ages twelve to fifteen here in Taiwan — who have studied English for years and speak it without hesitation, but who go blank when asked what a "be" verb is, how a verb changes after a third-person singular subject, how to choose a tense, or which nouns are countable and which aren't.

It isn't that they haven't worked, and it isn't that they started late. It's that nobody ever formally taught them any of it.

Speaking a language and teaching it are two different things

A native speaker has intuition about their own language, but intuition is not the same as being able to break it into rules and explain it to someone else. Not every Taiwanese adult could teach Chinese either — to stand in front of a class here, you need teacher training and certification first. Teaching is its own profession, quite separate from knowing the language.

Native-speaker teachers from abroad are an excellent route to ear and fluency; we have no doubt about that. The thing to watch is different: it's very hard for a parent to judge, from a single trial lesson, how much teacher training someone has had — especially when the lesson runs entirely in English and the room is having a good time. A child who is happy and willing to speak looks like a child who is learning well.

Why grammar is the part that goes missing

There are two reasons, and neither is laziness on the teacher's part.

First, native speakers find their own rules genuinely hard to articulate. We can't cleanly explain the difference between the Chinese aspect markers le and guo either — we use them correctly, but we can't say why. Turning intuition into teachable rules takes separate training.

Second, spoken language is extremely forgiving of grammatical error. When a foreigner speaks Chinese with a couple of odd turns, we still follow them; the reverse holds too. So in a conversation class, grammar mistakes carry almost no consequence — which means they rarely get addressed.

Written language has no such cushion. Nobody receiving a business letter riddled with errors stops to work out what was meant; they quietly downgrade their estimate of the company. And written accuracy is exactly what English assessment from junior high onwards is testing.

"This chapter is easy" is the hardest illusion to undo

A child trained only on speaking and vocabulary usually sails through the first chapter or two of junior high: they know the words, they follow the sentences. And so they draw a conclusion — I don't need to listen in this subject, and I don't need to revise it.

The trouble is that the conclusion outlives the evidence. By the time grammar starts to carry real weight and they need to go back and fill in the gaps, they have already filed the subject under "easy". Getting a child who believes something is easy to sit down and study rules is harder than teaching a child who knew from the start that they didn't know.

So when you're choosing a teacher, it's worth asking directly: how does this course handle grammar? You can also test it yourself — ask your child to explain why the verb in a given sentence takes an s. If they can, they've learnt something beyond imitation.

One last note for any child currently catching up on grammar: don't memorise rules on their own — memorise them attached to example sentences. Rules learnt in isolation fade quickly; the sentences are what stay. The rule grows out of the sentence, not the other way round.