We’ve all heard it before; apparently the level of literacy of high school students entering university is going down to a disgracefully low level.
This year about a third of the students that took the dreaded ELPE failed. That’s right, one out of every three students. The most common excuse is usually that the level of English taught in high schools is no longer high enough or that “MSN Messenger” and other forms of informal written communication are to blame for the invention of acronyms.
More important than spreading the blame however is to find out what is done to remedy students’ English once we are in university. Speaking from personal experience I’d say that my level of written communication certainly has not improved since I got to UW. I would even go as far as to say that it’s gotten worse. Why? I have not written a single extended piece of writing (other than for the IW) since I graduated from high school that was evaluated based on grammar or spelling.
I’m prepared to guess that if I tried writing such a piece, it would probably contain a lot of pathetic mistakes and a terrible overall structure. I’m certainly not volunteering to write term papers and let them be covered in little red circles, but I’d really appreciate having someone draw a bit of attention to the blatant mistakes I make in my lab reports so that I don’t make the same mistakes when I’m on a work term. Perfect paragraph structure (with an opening statement and etc.) isn’t essential for engineering students, but constructing a logical and easy to follow argument is. And as much as I like taking advantage of the fact that I speak and write better English than many of the TAs marking my work, I would still like having someone who could notice my mistakes and point them out to me from time to time.
The other reason I believe my writing has gotten worse is because of the many mistakes I notice in my notes. As I make my notes, I don’t always pay attention to what I’m copying down, and as a result, they are covered in terrible spellings of all sorts. The worst part is these mistakes become a habit; I now have to check if definitely, definately, definetely or definitily is the right spelling for a word that I use on a regular basis.
I wouldn’t go so far as to blame my professors for my own grammatical and spelling weaknesses, but it would probably be safe to say that if some of our professors had to write the ELPE, they ‘d fail. A combination of sketchy handwriting (is that an 8 or an E?) and terrible spelling might even make it impossible for the markers to comprehend the essays.
While cultural diversity amongst the teaching body here at Waterloo is amazing, it also means that students’ level of written and oral communication has gotten so low that even some employers are complaining.
Criticizing the level of writing displayed by students is universal; it was already a contentious issue when our grandparents were our age and is an equally debated problem in the francophone world. Since it is a long, boring issue, it is safe to say that if I continue to spell stuff wrong it won’t start a nuclear war (I might even be like Shakespeare and invent new words) but it probably would disturb you lovely readers if I started writing lieke dis.
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