What do you think about this?

People who learn English as their first language speak and write the vernacular version . . . A textbook gives a much more formally standardized "education" than does real life. There is also the factor that foreigners feel pressure to make up for other aspects of speaking the language (like heavy accents, etc.) My grandmother was a Norwegian immigrant and was very strict with her kids on grammar because she herself had a thick accent, which held a certain social stigmatism in her day. I'm an American who has taught English as a foreign language in China and here in the U.S. and I definitely agree that overall my students' spelling is much better than that of native peers their same age in the U.S. I'm not saying either way is better, but the differences are interesting nonetheless.