University Students Can't Write

[jon]

Students failing because of Twitter, texting and no grammar teaching
By Susanna Kelley (CP) – 2 days ago

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 are 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 re-written "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' -'definitely'. I don't know why," says Paul Budra, an English professor and associate dean of arts and science at Simon Fraser.

"Punctuation errors are huge, and apostrophe errors. Students seem to have absolutely no idea what an apostrophe is for. None. Absolutely none."

He is floored by some of what he sees.

"I get their essays and I go 'You obviously don't know what a sentence fragment is. You think commas are sort of like parmesan cheese that you sprinkle on your words'," said Budra.

Then he's reduced to teaching basic grammar to them himself.

He says this has been going on now for the 20 years he's taught college and university in B.C. and Ontario-only the mistakes have changed.

He too blames poor - or no - grammar instruction in lower schools.

"When I went to high school in the '70s I was never taught grammar in English. I learned grammar from Latin classes."

Budra was taught to read and write using whole language rather than phonetics - not a good way to go in his books.

"We haven't taught grammar for 30-40 years...(and it) hasn't worked."

"It's not that hard to teach basic grammar," he says.

Ontario's Ministry of Education says grammar is a part of both its elementary and high school curriculum.

Cellphone texting and social networking on Internet sites are degrading writing skills, say even experts in the field.

"I think it has," says Joel Postman, author of "SocialCorp: Social Media Goes Corporate," who has taught Fortune 500 companies how to use social networking.

The Internet norm of ignoring punctuation and capitalization as well as using emoticons may be acceptable in an email to friends and family, but it can have a deadly effect on one's career if used at work.

"It would say to me ... 'well, this person doesn't think very clearly, and they're not very good at analyzing complex subjects, and they're not very good at expressing themselves, or at worse, they can't spell, they can't punctuate,' " he says.

"These folks are going to short-change themselves, and right or wrong, they're looked down upon in traditional corporations," notes Postman.

But "spelling is getting better because of Spellcheck," says Margaret Proctor, University of Toronto writing support co-ordinator.

James Turk of the Association of University Teachers takes all the complaints about student literacy with a grain of salt.

"There's a notion of a golden age in the past that students were wonderful, unlike now. I'm not sure that golden age ever existed," he says.

"You can go back and read Plato and see Socrates talking about the allegations that this generation isn't as not as good as previous ones," he notes.

[jon]

Mike Cleaver got beat up for posting this story on another radio board. And it appeared as if none of the bullies had even bothered to read the article.

Unless my reading comprehension has gone down the tubes, the real point here is whether or not it is reasonable to expect that a University graduate should be able to write text that could go in an organization's Annual Report.

"I should hope so." would be my reaction as someone who hired people in both the public and private sectors. "Bad enough that most university graduates have no practical experience in their field of study."

The answer to this whole mess, which has been brewing for quite some time, is quite simple. The issue has been around since I started at UBC in 1970: the minority of students who graduate from high school with decent marks, but lack even a basic level of knowledge/skill/expertise in one or more areas required by universities. Some of which is from no fault of the student. For example, my best friend back then moved from Toronto (as a CHUM fan) to Montreal (as a CFOX fan) during high school and completely missed out on Geometry. Being a Math major at UBC, this presented a problem.

The simple solution that I am alluding to is Entrance Exams. Standard in the U.S. But I'm not aware of any post-secondary institute in this country that requires them. I got suckered into writing some at UBC, in a World War II shack when it was 90F outside, a lot hotter inside, and I was still bleeding from having an impacted wisdom tooth extracted. My mother took off half a day of work to get me there and home. It turned out that the exams I wrote were never even looked at, and only would have been had I ever talked to a University counsellor.

Not in July when I wrote them. But in January half way through Grade 12, so you would have a chance to get the results, learn what you didn't know, and write them again in April when you normally get acceptance or denial from your post-secondary institute of choice for entrance the upcoming September.

[Howaboutthat]

Mike Cleaver got beat up for posting this story on another radio board.

I thought we decided there wasn't another radio board last week? Is he not able to post it himself?

[Jack Bennest]

http://www.sowny.ca/


I suspect Mike ran into trouble in the South Ontario Board - link above

[Jack Bennest]

......and based on my review of the 'sowny' thread - I think Mike did well.

Most people agreed that not enough attention is given to basic spellin and punk,tawation

[slowhand]

Mike Cleaver got beat up for posting this story on another radio board.

I thought we decided there wasn't another radio board last week?

I thought we decided that there is only one other radio board: sowny.ca. So, you're right. jon should have said "on the other radio board." Shame on you, jon.

[mightymouth]

Mike Cleaver got beat up for posting this story on another radio board.

I thought we decided there wasn't another radio board last week?

I thought we decided that there is only one other radio board: sowny.ca. So, you're right. jon should have said "on the other radio board." Shame on you, jon.

slowhand, would you please get a haircut? You're scaring the children.

[slowhand]

Actually, as you might have guessed, I'm not as young as the bloke pictured in my avatar. Truth be told, it is my cousin's youngest son, taken at Christmas time in Australia where most of that side of the family now lives.

[Mike Cleaver]

The reason I posted a link to this story on SOWNY is that it re-affirmed my findings during my semester of teaching 160 first and second year Radio students at BCIT.
Part of my job was reading and marking exam essays by prospective course entrants.
I also received copies of their transcripts from high school, other colleges and some universities.
Another part was live interviews with prospective candidates.
On the written English front, even students with Honours English, the results were pretty poor.
Atrocious spelling, no capitalization, no sense of punctuation, incorrect words used and no idea how to put a thought on paper.
The interviews could be even worse.
People who were hoping to communicate on-air couldn't put together a comprehensive sentence when answering relatively simple questions.
This is not a criticism of BCIT but it doesn't bode well for the teaching of English at lower levels.
I suggested that the course should include remedial English for those who were accepted to the program but who obviously had a problem with writing.
Alas, there was no time for that, given budget and time restraints.
There were some notable exceptions to these findings but they usually were the mature students, who had either completed courses in College or University or had some life experience working where communication, both written and oral, were important.
Another point I made, if you can't write correctly, why would you believe that any more care was given to reporting the facts in your article?