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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Twitter, texting create illiteracy epidemic, say profs

By: Susanna Kelley

Posted: 02/1/2010 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

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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