As American in China for nearly two years I can see firsthand the difficulty with the grammatic rules of English. English is now required for all students in China and many as young as seven years old can hold a surprising decent chat in English.
That said China is losing some of it's best students due to English grammer. The examinations are based solely on grammer and word memorization. Imagine your child wanting to be an engineer and and excelling in all subjects except that C in Chinese grammer puts him or her out of the running for college. That's the reality here.
I really feel for these kids. As an American my English is always in high demand from parents wanting to give their child an extra advantage. I turn them down saying I'm a businessman, not a teacher, however the reality is a middle school student must pass an English grammer examination that is equal to a U.S. university English 201 exam to just attend high school and I simply wouldn't want to fail them.
O.K. I'm way off topic now but thought I would share.

Well, China has good education with a poor economy so the competition is going to be horrible.

Dean, I like the idea of having linguists get together with English professors. In fact, one could expand the idea.

I once gave pause to my Software Engineering prof when I suggested that programmers should study general semantics. :)

I haven't visited your links, but my impression is that linguists are simply far too permissive in their views on English. If it were up to linguists, English would change too much, too quickly--and it would be very difficult for us to understand texts written in different centuries.

As an English major, I feel like I'm trying to hold the barbarians at the gates, while my linguist friends smoke cigars and say, "hey, what's wrong with a few barbarians? Let 'em in; they only want to pillage and plunder a bit. Then they'll go."

Dean:

Your defense of Ebonics was very interesting. I hadn't expected to see such a thing -- but, then again, that's the main reason I come here, to see things I don't expect. It shows that you _are_ indeed a liberal, in the true sense, the sense in which you so often speak, i.e., open to new ideas, willing to consider different points of view, no matter how unorthodox or alien. Balances out the conservative*, i.e., sticking to old ways, which is, as I age, increasingly my dominant tendency and the dominant tendency of many of us on this blog. Before I read your argument for Ebonics (or, rather, for a "compare-contrast" approach to Ebonics vis-a-vis standard English), I was just flat against it, had just dismissed it, but you changed my mind. Your argument was very well thought out and clear. Thank you.

*I must say that I myself am very conservative, and increasingly so, with regard to our precious English language. Languages evolve, they say, but they also degenerate, and can be deliberately corrupted by the dishonest. I'm very protective of the meanings of words, above all. I fear Newspeak, which is already upon us with Political Correctness and other ideological bastardizations. It's fashionable today in America to hate the French because of their government's foreign policy, but I, for one, admire their language and their conservatism with regard to it.