I don't even have a good feel for how well the British are at speaking English.

On average, no weller than Americans.

There was a study several years ago of British students studying foreign languages at university (a friend of mine reading German at Aston actually participated). Almost all had a much better grip on the grammar and syntax of their adopted language than they did on those of English.

And the reason for this is simple: pupils learning foreign languages at school are taught grammar; nobody ever teaches the grammar of English.

True story #1: in a French lesson at age 14, just beginning the two-year course for the new-for-our-year GCSE examination, our French teacher was telling us of her horror at the dumbing-down that had occurred since the previous year's O-level syllabus. "You don't even have to be able to use the past tense correctly any more," she said, "I mean, how many of you can use the past tense already, two years before the exam?" Several hands went up, but she must have also got some blank looks, because she said, "OK, how many of you understand the concept of past tense and present tense -- whether in English or in French?" Not every hand went up -- and this in the top French set out of five. And I only knew about it from other French lessons -- no English teacher had ever mentioned it.

True Story #2: in the sixth form, we had "General Studies lessons", where for six lessons each we'd get a smattering of economics from an economics teacher, an overview of biology from a biology teacher, and so on. When we got an English teacher we basically ganged up on him and forced him to teach us grammar. In thirteen years of education, those six lessons were the only formal instruction in English grammar any of us had.

Peter