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Winnipeg Free Press > Canada > Twitter, texting create illiteracy epidemic, say profs

Canada

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Twitter, texting create illiteracy epidemic, say profs

By: Susanna Kelley

1/02/2010 1:00 AM | Comments: 5

DAMIAN DOVARGANES / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS ARCHIVES Universities fear sites like Twitter are contributing to declining grammar skills.

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DAMIAN DOVARGANES / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS ARCHIVES Universities fear sites like Twitter are contributing to declining grammar skills.

TORONTO -- Little or no grammar teaching, cellphone texting, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, all are being blamed for an increasingly unacceptable number of post-secondary students who can't write properly.

For years there's been a flood of anecdotal complaints from professors about what they say is the wretched state of English grammar coming from some of their students.

Now there seems to be some solid evidence.

Ontario's Waterloo University is one of the few post-secondary institutions in Canada to require the students they accept to pass an exam testing their English-language skills.

Almost a third of those students are failing.

"Thirty per cent of students who are admitted are not able to pass at a minimum level," says Ann Barrett, managing director of the English-language proficiency exam at Waterloo University.

"We would certainly like it to be a lot lower."

Barrett says the failure rate has jumped five percentage points in the past few years, up to 30 per cent from 25 per cent.

"What has happened in high school that they cannot pass our simple test of written English, at a minimum?" she asks. Even those with good marks out of Grade 12, so-called elite students, "still can't pass our simple test," she says.

Poor grammar is the major reason students fail, says Barrett. "If a student has problems with articles, prepositions, verb tenses, that's a problem."

Some students in public schools are no longer being taught grammar, she believes. "Are they (really) preparing students for university studies?"

At Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, one in 10 new students is not qualified to take the mandatory writing courses required for graduation.

That 10 per cent must take so-called "foundational" writing courses first.

Simon Fraser is reviewing its entrance requirements for English language.

"There has been this general sense in the last two or three years that we are finding more students are struggling in terms of language proficiency," says Rummana Khan Hemani, the university's director of academic advising.

Emoticons, happy faces, sad faces, cuz, are just some of the writing horrors being handed in, say professors and administrators at Simon Fraser.

"Little happy faces... or a sad face... little abbreviations," show up even in letters of academic appeal, says Khan Hemani. "Instead of 'because', it's 'cuz'. That's one I see fairly frequently," she says, and these are new in the past five years.

Khan Hemani sends appeal submissions with emoticons in them back to students to be rewritten "because a committee will immediately get their backs up when they see that kind of written style."

Professors are seeing their share of bad grammar in essays as well.

"The words 'a lot' have become one word, for everyone, as far as I can tell. 'Definitely' is always spelled with an 'a' -- 'definately'. I don't know why," says Paul Budra, an English professor and associate dean of arts and science at Simon Fraser.

-- The Canadian Press

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition February 1, 2010 A8

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There is a right way and wrong way to use our language skills. Schools no matter what grade level should demand near perfection with the English language. What and how we express ourselves otherwise is our choice. I was once in university and failed a paper miserably because i did not know how to form a proper sentence. I was crushed and realized that the public school failed in preparing me. I shudder to think of how children are promoted today. This is not a good trend in my eyes. I agree with this article to some degree. We should not blame technology but those that get lazy be it teachers, students or parents. French immersion school demands my son speak French properly when in school/class. I do not however hear of teachers demanding English to be spoken properly to same degree. We parents can only do so much but Schools Must Help with the rest. Don't promote ... Educate!

This is terrible! I know a cringe when I read some of the Free Press comments.

Schools need to get back to the basics - yes creativity is important but without the building blocks - grammar and spelling - your creativity is useless.

Between my sibling and i we have 3 years difference in age - whereas i went through the phonics and flash card stage starting kindergarten in the late 80's - through the same school 3 years later the emphasis wasn't on grammar and spelling but rather creativity. They didn't want to stifle the children's creativity by correcting their grammar and spelling - as "this could be fixed later on" .. my sibling still can't spell correctly.

Old habits are hard to break - and if you learn to spell definitely by writing it 'definately' - have fun trying to break that habit...

The chickens of educational romanticism are coming home to roost: a generation of students filled with self-esteem, aka narcissism, but without the skills to write a simple declarative sentence. All of this is the fault of adults. Take a look at the Grade 12 provincial English exam. For the most part, students can do well on this joke of an "assessment tool" without even being required to write grammatically or spell correctly. The student exemplars provided by the Department of Education are rife with writing errors and yet are given top scores. Jonathan Swift, we have need of thee.

This problem is mostly a reflection of the breakdown in the distinction between formality and informality. As our society continues to blur those lines, it becomes difficult to make the case to students that there is any value in the more formal modes of expression (like standard grammar/diction) and presentation (like dressing up for certain situations). This is two-edged: it's a residue from the social upheaval of the '60's where language and dress were weapons used to bring down illegitimate authority (a good thing), but it has led to a state of affairs where we are losing a common professional language (standard English) which will impede communication (a bad thing).

The other problem is the old perennial conflict between language as a living evolving enterprise and our need for it to be preserved so that we can communicate not only with each other in the present but with our past as well. There has always been high and low language. It's the purpose of formal education to preserve and transmit high language, thus the conflict with the vernacular is perpetual and inevitable.

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