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But this scenario doesn't fit with Serrano's experiences of English, where nonnative English speakers who learned the language in a classroom are often more educated on grammar rules and complex technical terms than American native speakers.In my experience as an EFL teacher living abroad in multiple countries... this is not even remotely accurate.
English students across the world are often "taught" a ton of nonsense grammatical rules that simply don't exist, or that are simplifications which don't always apply.
I remember one interview at a school where the (non-native English speaker) director criticized me for ending a sentence with a preposition -- a classic "fake" rule.
I once reviewed an English test used for Citibank interviews, which I would have failed because a majority of the multiple-choice questions had more than one perfectly valid answer, but I guess not according to the overly simple grammar "rules" that were taught.
It actually can become a serious source of tension between foreign learners who are proud of the 10 years they spent in English classes and insist they therefore speak "correctly", while you the native speaker are making "mistakes".
I remember one memorable conversation where a work colleague tried to insist that something at the store was "costly", and wouldn't accept that the correct term was "expensive" (or just "costs too much"). The dictionary we had wasn't of much help either, since definitions often don't capture the actual subtleties of usage and connotation.
I also can't count the number of times actual (again, non-native) English teachers insisted it was correct to say "I have a doubt" rather than "I have a question" when you don't understand something... and often there's literally no convincing them, because how could their 10 years in the classroom and 20 years of teaching be wrong...?