I’m embarrassed to confess that I got through my undergraduate degree in English Literature without knowing what a gerund was (or a noun come to that). But I soon learnt. My postgraduate was in Applied Linguistics!!

I hope you’re OK. Please take care. I am typing this to a background of wailing and “Mummy? MUMMEEEEEEEEEE?” and “Brrrm! Brrrm!” so I can’t add intelligent comments like everyone else….!

Then we have the phenomenon of text messaging, which trains people to wrt lk ths, iykwim.

I would write more but my massage client is here and I must go work.

But the exams are also quite sophisticated and require you to know a lot about the exam, the types of question it has and tips for approaching them, how it’s put together, what each section is testing, how its scored and so on. I agree with Reed when she says that increases in grades are often because teachers and students have got better at this now the exam format for GCSEs and A levels have really settled down.

The problem is that I suspect that exam tips are taking over from the subject matter almost entirely. We’ve got a secondary school French teacher on the course at the moment and we were discussing reading skills and how to design and run tasks to help students develop them (and how not to).

She suddenly say up and said that she’d been teaching students how to find the right answers to exam questions, and that was pretty much it .’The first quesiton begins with the word ‘where’. The answer is going to be the first answer in the text so you are looking for a place name. Place name have capitals. This word here is in the first paragraph and has a capital, so it’s probably that.’

Most of her students, se said in an increasingly horrified voice, probably wouldn’t be confidently able to tell you what the texts they’ve been reading are actually about by the end (although that’s got to be an exam design fault too, so perhaps the exams are not as well designed as I assumed). And she’s actually rather good, now.

But mostly, I’m afraid, I do blame the sixties. The era which decided to throw out anything approaching an attempt to teach any kind of rule in almost every subject in favour of writing a freeform poem about it.

Of course they problem with spelling and such is that English is taught by Literature graduates. Most of the ones on our course don’t have much of a clue themselves about the practical application or mechanics of language. I find it particularly worrying that they don’t seem to understand text structure well enough to write straight comprehension questions. Obviously there are honorable exceptions to this, but still.

On the other hand, I wonder what they do know that we don’t know they know. A book I read recently called “The kids are alright” (sic) took a look at the behaviours of the gaming generation – computer games don’t “improve hand / eye coordination” but they do make you patient, determined, willing to put the hours in with minimal instruction and supervision, and willing to experiment.

Also, my education as taught in school was narrowly focussed and contextless, being based entirely on the curriculum. It was a private school too, so there was NO excuse for not starting with 55BC when we were 10, and ending up with 19thC history for O Levels and the 20th C for As. Oh no. We jumped around from era to era as each History teacher in turn left to spawn.

Like Teuchter, what worries me is the widespread illiteracy I find online in places like Freecycle. It worries me that good spelling is seen as an unnecessary add-on rather than as a way to make sure that your message gets through. And with more and more communication being text-based, people whose parents never had to write more than a note for the milkman are now, well, posting on Freecycle. I wonder if it is in fact Darwinian? As meeting one’s mate online becomes the norm, will those who simply cannot communicate at all using the written word just get selected out of the gene pool?

*pauses to extract tongue from cheek*

Poor literacy will be accepted until it is recognised as being disabling, and unfortunately my peers, who like me were taught in the touchy-feely un-regimented self-expressing 60s are now head teachers and running the educashun kwangoes. And on top of that there is anticant’s comment that he once heard a mandarin there say “we don’t want clever people in this country because clever people cause trouble”.

Perhaps if we positioned the ability to spell as the ultimate act of subversive rebellion…..?

Aphra.

I’m in agreement with your view that these bright children can indeed pass exams very effectively but many trot off to tertiary education in a state of not actually knowing very much. Still – I hope that’s what univ’s for, apart from keeping the British booze industry ticking over nicely of course.

What saddens me greatly is that a huge tranche of school leavers are unable to communicate what they do know via the written word.
My daughter teaches in an FE college and some of the work students hand in is incomprehensible. They may know what they’re trying to say but have never been given/developed the skill of writing.

It’s probably due to a combination of factors – at the top of which list I’d put Not Reading Enough.
Add to that an education system which has been tinkered about with too many times over the last forty years and this current ideology that no-one should be allowed to fail at anything, ever – and we have a generation of people who missed out big time.

Sorry – I think I was venturing into rant territory a wee bit there

Hope your sister’s results are good.