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This 'ere is likely to be a long post, so if you've better things to do, I suggest that now would be a good time.

I employ staff for various kinds of work for my firm. Not all of them are IT geeks, but most of them are. With very few exceptions they can't write for nuts. One or two are functionally illiterate. One of the employment tests we use is known as the VIT - a Verbal Integration Test. It doesn't ask you to write anything, it asks you to respond to simple questions. On average the applicants' scores fall within about the fortieth percentile which, effectively, means that they understand little of what they read.

We employ them anyway, unless the other criteria are not met. Why? Because if we didn't, we wouldn't have any new staff at all.

I spend a good deal of my time rewriting business cases, terms of reference, reports, even letters. Out of perhaps 200 people at the premises I work at, I would say only 50 people have medium to good skills in written English.

This is, to my way of thinking, a shocking state of affairs. Here we are, entering or in the twenty-first century (depending on the way you count years) and more and more of New Zealand's youth are leaving school with no ability to hold up their end of a written communication. I don't know whether this is the case internationally or not.

The silly thing is that for years New Zealand was held up as a shining example of a literacy education system. Yet, between my leaving primary (elementary) school and my sister, who is eleven years younger than me, reaching it, something happened which has resulted in the situation today. My sister is bright as a button (she's just completing a PhD), yet my mother and I spent hours and hours teaching her to read the old-fashioned way - using word lists, spelling words out, learning word order, writing repetitively and all the other "obsolete" approaches to teaching reading and writing. She's only just forgiven me, some thirty years on. And she wasn't alone. A friend of mine who is a high school history teacher told me ten years ago that she and her colleagues actually have to teach kids to read before they can teach their subject sensibly.

For several years I was involved in the local adult literacy programme, teaching adults who had slipped through the educational cracks to read and write. Most of them were ashamed of their lack of literacy and some went to extraordinary lengths to disguise why they were visiting me or why I was visiting them. One woman used to hint to her neighbours that we were having an affair! And most of them picked it up pretty quickly, again using the old-fashioned methods, the "cat sat on the mat" approach rather than "it's okay if you spell it 'kyt', dear, because everyone will know what you mean."

The active members of this list (with the notable exception of Jazz) appear to be mainly "older" people, and I gather that most, if not all, have tertiary qualifications. No insults intended, but most of us also seem to be of "mature" years. There are about 1740 members on the list worldwide. It's not hard to find. Given that there are supposed to be over 70 million people with access to the Internet, 1740 seems a paltry number.

What do others think about this - the whys and wherefores?

And what does everyone think we can do about it?



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When my son was in elementary school (2nd grade if I remember correctly) I went to a parent teacher meeting armed with a story my son had written. Though it had a passing grade it was rife with spelling mistakes, none of which had been circled or underlined. When I brought it up, the teacher said that the new educational guidelines forbade correcting grammar because it would give the children, and I quote, “the red mark syndrome.” Correction marks on a paper apparently discouraged children to such an extent that they would never want to write again!

The teacher was supposed to note the words that the children had trouble with, and incorporate them into daily class work. I found this to be utterly ridiculous since there was no way one teacher could possibly bring up all the words kids are wont to misspell. I gave her the permission to “mark away,” and she seemed genuinely happy to get my o.k. She was quite certain that she was churning out a bunch of illiterates but was forced to follow the guidelines set out by the school board and their flock of psychologists.



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La belle Bel replied: She was quite certain that she was churning out a bunch of illiterates but was forced to follow the guidelines set out by the school board and their flock of psychologists.

Yes, yes. This seems to be part of "the new learning". The one-size-fits-all approach appears to have become a political correctness issue, with schools competing to be more correct than the others. The kids are the losers.



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My AP English teacher, who is also the English Department Chair for the school district, often talks about how we're not being taught proper grammar. She says that the problem is that most teachers find grammar utterly boring, but she really enjoys it. She frequently lambastes us about grammatical errors. The problems that she finds aren't usually spelling (that's fixed by computer spell checks now) but errors like comma splicing, quoting, sit/set, lay/lie type things. I agree it's a major problem and is quite annoying, but I think, as with other educational problems, parental involvement is needed.


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I think that a part of the problem is strictly related to the difficulty of writing English: our children have no problems - or have LESS problems- since words are written in the same way in which they pronounce them, and they don't need to imagine or remember the correct spelling.
Anyway, there is another aspect of the problem which seems to be common : it seems that students cannot obtain from the schools a good instruction - or at least skills enough - as before ... years ago...
But we cannot forget that we are making a comparison between very different situations: now we are trying to let everyone have an instruction, then just few -usually rich and/or clever - could.
For example, I am now teaching at the University, while my grand-mother was not even able to read and to write - well, not exactly: she was barely able to write his name - and I have this sweet memory : we were together making exercises - she (75) was slowly writing her name, while I (5) was learning to write my first words..

Emanuela


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Jazz, you said: She says that the problem is that most teachers find grammar utterly boring

This is probably true. It's not the most interesting subject in the world to teach. And pupils generally don't want to learn it, either.

Often, I think, pupils think that because they can speak the language they know all they need to. I think everyone on this board would know better, including you.

A lack of interest in teaching and learning in any subject means that you wind up with a situation where the teacher pretends to teach, the pupil pretends to learn, and honour is satisfied.

The downstream effects are pretty obvious.

When I was teaching business analysis and design, I would not pass any student who couldn't write a sentence, capital letter, full stop, commas in appropriate places and all. I made any student who didn't plan a report do it again. The most dreaded thing I could do, I've been told was to scrawl across the front page of an assignment: "Incomprehensible and illiterate - see me". Not my usual approach to teaching, but most students felt that they were pretty crash hot at writing. It took shock treatment to make them see otherwise.

Since in any given academic year of two semesters I would have had, perhaps, twenty students who were in this category, the Remedial English Department had a lot of customers.

It didn't make me popular, but it means that those students will be less embarrassed in the work place. A lot of them have thanked me since, but there are a few who still snarl when they see me ...

You said further on: The problems that she finds aren't usually spelling (that's fixed by computer spell checks now)

Sorry, disagree. As an example, a spell checker will tell you if you have misspelt a word, but it won't tell you if it's the wrong word - e.g. hare, hair and here to provide a simplistic example. Spell checkers should be banned until the user is able to spot their own mistakes! Did you see Faldage's take on Little Red Riding Hood? That's spell-checking for you.



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Hi Emanuela.

I would agree that almost any European language is easier to learn, both syntactically and grammatically, than English. As you say, Italian is spelled pretty much as it is spoken, and that's a real bonus for you. English, unfortunately, does not always, and in some cases, hardly ever, has a one-to-one correspondence between spelling and pronunciation.

I understand your comments about the contrast between your educational opportunities and those that your grandmother didn't have. Italy had centuries of class division, city-state warfare and foreign invasion to cope with.

In New Zealand, education has been pretty much available to all for nearly 150 years. And apart from the days of the gold rush, most of the immigrants who came here were literate to some degree and prized it highly.

I'd venture to suggest that the standards of written English in New Zealand today are worse than they were 100 years ago. However, I have no proof of this except for the evidence I see on a daily basis.



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I think that I have posted elsewhere that affairs here in Edinburgh seem to be taking a turn for the better.

My daughter's school, in common with others in the area adopted a rather "old fashioned" method of teaching spelling, based on lists of words with the same sounds, highlighting words which sounded different but were spelt the same or words which sounded the same and were spelt differently. It was rediscoved because in some schools the children with "special needs" were doing better than the children taught in more "modern" ways. On the subject of grammar, both children seem to be coming home with English homework that is more sophisticated than the work that I was doing at the same age. Let's hope that things are improving.

The way I was taught was not particularly impressive. I only just escaped being taught ITA (Intermediate Teaching Alphabet - waz, sed etc) which I regard as one of the lowest points in the teaching of English!


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In reply to:

years ago


Interesting to read about your grandmother. My grandmother was an interesting example of the possibilities of education. She was born in 1883, the second of six children in a dirt-poor farming family in rural Pennsylvania. (Excursus: the reason they were so poor had to do with a sad romantic story from the time of the Civil War, which I may get to on these boards someday.) She started school at the age of 8. The school was the typical one-room rural school of the time, and it was 9 miles from her home. She only attended school in the winter, since she was needed at home in fall and spring to help with harvesting and planting, and school was closed in the summer. She went to school only 4 years, at which time, having reached the age of 12, she, like her siblings, left home, in order to reduce the number of mouths to feed, and made her own way in the world. (She went to the nearest large city, Harrisburg, and found employment as a housemaid with a wealthy Jewish family who treated her like a daughter until she left them after 15 years to marry my grandfather.) How well was she educated? She know little history, little geography, no foreign languages; she knew arithmetic well and could add up a grocer's bill and balance a checkbook; she could read any non-technical text quite well, and had read through the AV (King James) Bible innumerable times and knew it forwards and backwards. She could write a letter with correct grammar and spelling and in a hand which, while not elegant, was clear and not at all illiterate-looking. When I was in college, she used to write me letters which were as correct as any which I wrote. How to account for this with the rudimentary schooling she received? I suspect that some of the culture and learning of her employers must have rubbed off on her (she had exquisite table manners and knew all about how to set an elaborate table, as you would expect from her old employment), but there must have been a truly remarkable foundation laid in that long ago schoolhouse in the country. We don't seem to be able to recapture that now.


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>>>there must have been a truly remarkable foundation laid in that long ago schoolhouse in the country. We don't seem to be able to recapture that now. <<<

I think that many of the problems with the youth of today stem from a lack of respect. Bob's grandmother was certainly taught to respect her parents, her school teachers and her employer. She learned well from them because she understood the value of language and math as well as table manners and other cultural learning. She respected the need for them. Young people today seem to take pride in their lack of respect. (I can't speak for all locations, of course, but I imagine it's more than just a local phenomenon) I can't begin to count the times I've heard teenagers talking about the way their parents (teachers, bosses, or anyone who is in a position of authority) 'get an attitude' with them. How are these kids going to learn anything from anyone when they see authority figures this way?! If kids have that little respect for their teachers and parents, they aren't going to try to emulate proper speech. In fact, they rebel by going out of their way to speak their own favourite version of the local slang.

Schools are part of the problem as well, if bel's story about her son's second grade teacher is an accurate representation of schools elsewhere. If teachers are afraid (or school boards may be at fault) to correct spelling and grammar, they are teaching children to do whatever they want because it does not matter. The children will learn quickly that it's easy to take advantage of the teacher since he/she doesn't have the authority to correct the pupils. The child writes 2+3=7. The teacher marks the problem wrong. The student goes to the teacher and says that it is right, and if it's marked wrong he's going to hate math forever (insert crying emoticon). In fear of loosing the kid's interest in math, the teacher concedes that 2+3=7. (It's close to the right answer anyway. It's an odd number under 10. It's even a prime!) In a situation where the teacher does not have the authority to correct the students' mistakes, we are showing children that respect for their teachers and the subjects they teach is not necessary.


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