Education has been compulsory in Britain since about 1880 (though obviously not up the age of 16). Why is that now, 125 years later, many kids reach age 16 with poor reading skills, to say nothing of writing and numeracy? One hears reports to the effect that something like 20% of sixteen-year-olds in Britain (and America, too) don't even have what is called 'functional literacy', that is the ability read at the level (thought to be) necessary in their environment - the level expected and needed of them.

Here's a link to a recent report about employers' complaints:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4170336.stm

Why is that for the last decade or so, even students majoring in English Literature (!) at a British university with a highly regarded English Department have been given on arrival a booklet on essay writing which also lists common errors among students of English literature that the teachers there have noticed in students' work? The list is truly mind-boggling. It includes comments on the importance of _not_ confusing such groups of words as these:

affect - effect

allusion - illusion

contemptible - contemptuous

diseased - deceased

disillusion - delusion

emiment - imminent (to say nothing of immanent)

judicial - judicious

persecute - prosecute

sight - site (to say nothing of cite)

there - their

whose - who's

There' also all the usual stuff about the use of apostrophes of course.

This booklet was compiled in 1994, and the situation has got worse since then. When the booklet was first distributed in 1994 a few of the secretaries were horrified. Many of them had left school at age 16, when some of them had been firmly told that they weren't 'university material' and had gone on to secretarial college, where any lingering confusion about the difference between, say, block and bloc was dealt with pretty quickly.

As for the original target audience - namely, students of English Literature - nearly all of them had a grade A in the subject at 'A' level!

Now what are students who are in a muddle about things like led and lead or simple and simplistic doing majoring in English Literatue? Do they even have the essential tools to study the subject?

Most importantly, what kind of teaching have these given between the ages of 5 and 18?
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As one of the moderators for this forum, I wish to appeal to anyone posting in this thread to try very hard not to get too worked up when posting. The issues seem to me extremely important, and it would be very unfortunate if the thread were to become so heated that it had to be locked.

Well, I don't have the answer to this, Bloomsby, but maybe my own experience as a teacher may help shed some light on the possible causes.

I graduated from university with a B.Sc. (Biol) and Dip.Ed. and commenced teaching in a high school as a science teacher. I hadn't been there long when I was summoned to the principal's office. He had in front of him one of my student's assignments, which I had corrected.

He proceeded to "haul me over the coals" for making so many corrections to the assignment. At first I didn't understand what the problem was - all I had done was circle the spelling, punctuation and grammar mistakes. I was informed that as a science teacher, it was not my place to worry about spelling, punctuation and grammar - apparently that was the province of the English teachers.

I argued that I expected science students to be able to spell scientific terms. Then I was also told that it was too discouraging to the students to have so many errors pointed out to them. He advised that I should only have picked out about half a dozen errors for correction. Any more than that would be too negative. As a newly graduated teacher without tenure, I had no choice but to comply with his wishes.

Now, as a parent, if I saw my child's assignment with only half a dozen errors highlighted, and lots of other errors seemingly undetected, my first thought would be that the teacher lacked the skills to detect the errors. The last thing in the world I want, as a teacher, is for my students to take home their assignments and have the parents say "No wonder Johnny isn't doing well - his teacher doesn't have a clue".

Well, needless to say, it didn't take long before dealing with issues like this put me right off teaching. I decided after about six weeks that I didn't like teaching but I stuck it out for almost three years before I quit and became a medical secretary/typist where my spelling, punctuation and grammar skills were appreciated.

Now, decades later, I am teaching medical secretaries. I teach customer service, audiotyping, medical reception and terminology. The audiotyping course, in particular, emphasises the importance of spelling, punctuation and grammar in medical correspondence. It never ceases to amaze me that the adults I teach have graduated high school and haven't a clue where to put an apostrophe.

We shouldn't be too quick to criticize primary and high school teachers. Part of the problem with education is that teachers are subjected to enforced compliance with whatever the current educational philosophy happens to be, whether they agree with it or not.

Wow. In reading bloomsby's list I realized I misused an embarrassing lot of them during my education. I think, in my particular case, the teachers were looking for content more than the finesse in presenting it - which is probably not such a good thing. Finally, once I got to college, one teacher nailed me (and I was actually grateful; my first few papers came back: Content - A. Grammar/Punctuation/Gross Comma Misuse - F. Overall grade - C). She liked my writing a lot but made no bones that I wasn't doing it exactly right. I learned quick. Ultimately it was a collaboration between the teacher and the student. Strangely, it took a while for that to find me. Interesting, too, to remember my Foreign Language classes. There every sentence had to read and sound exactly right. But, for some reason, English was much looser in terms of expectation. Hmmm.

Edited because I still spell like a Pet Rock might...

As a highschool student in Victoria, I've noticed that there is hardly any emphasis put on spelling, punctuation and grammar in English classes. These days, more focus is put on studying issues and texts, writing essays and point of view pieces. Spelling/grammar/punctuation aren't even a part of the criteria for assessment. If this issue was addressesd, a lot of the common and basic errors could be cut out quite easily.

Reading helps too. I've always loved reading books and that certainly has played a part in having better grammatical and spelling skills than a lot of others. But a lot of students don't even pick up a book these days, thinking of it more as a chore than something that can be enjoyable and fun. And because of their lack of interest in books, their English skills have suffered.

Edit: just correcting a few spelling errors

I'm an English writing peer tutor at my school, and when I signed up to do this, I was totally expecting to get English-as-a-second-language students, or students with ADD. Imagine my surprise when most of the people I was tutoring were born and bred Canadians who went through the same school system I did. Their level of writing was so poor that I couldn't believe it. I hadn't even studied anything different. I never took English writing classes or anything like that, yet, I was an immigrant, who came into the school system late, had to learn a whole new language, and somehow managed to pick up these things that these people (some older than me even) didn't know.

To me it comes down to quality of teaching and learning environments. I had awesome teachers in high school. Some teachers have to be better than others. Some teachers decide to emphasize (lol, emphasize - empathize, I've seen that mistake a lot.) grammar/punctuation/sentence structure... the whole lot, while others choose to pay more attention to the ideas being presented rather than the way they have been presented.

In Canada, the most used excuse for the lack in literacy skills in students (probably a well founded excuse) is that of class sizes/number of students in each class. Too many kids means not enough one on one time between the teacher and each student. If the teacher can't sit down with each student and pin-point their level of need, it will be hard to catch the problem early, nevermind correcting it early. The most they can do is correct the assignment and hope the child takes it home to their parents who might then sit down and explain the problems. However, in this day and age, many parents don't even speak English so they wouldn't be able to explain what the child had done wrong.

In high school, kids don't really feel it's important to understand what they did wrong, so long as they pass the course and get the credit. I recently editted my 18 year old brother's final essay for his philosophy class so he could graduate from high school. Errors like the ones above in Bloomsby's post, your classic run on sentences, cat/dog sentences, and basic punctuation errors were rampant throughout the thing. I think it's due to a combination of a bad teaching/learning situation, the students own unwillingness to learn the rules on their own, as well as particular teachers unwillingness to drill the rules of grammar into the students.

We all make mistakes. Even in typing up a quick post we might make one of the above mistakes (I probably have) because we don't have time to go back and read the post to edit it (because maybe it's almost 5am or something like that. ), however, when people majoring in English are making these mistakes over and over again, I'd say it's definitely (this being a word I almost always spell wrong and probably have right now) time to review and revamp our education systems.

Ooops, that was longer than I intended it to be.

When my husband and I first started dating, his youngest sister was still in her last year of highschool. I remember his mother looking at some of her papers and trying to help her make corrections, but his sister insisted that she had done just fine. Sure enough she brought home an A in the subject.
The next year she went to university, and failed her Language Proficiency test. The procedure should have been for her to retake the test. A second failure would have required her to take a remedial course in order to graduate.
She kept stalling about taking the retest, and sure enough, they dropped the requirement. So she graduated without having to improve the skills which were found so lacking.
Now in Ontario there is a Grade 10 Language Proficiency test, which all students must pass (before graduation) or they get a different type of high school diploma that will not allow access to university. There has been enough complaint from parents, that there's talk of changing that ruling too.
My daughter passed the test this last year (you don't get a mark, just a pass/fail) and she cannot spell to save her life. Her command of the language is otherwise excellent, but she has a real block where spelling is concerned, and I have tried my hardest over the years to help her (I am a teacher).

MG, as a student, I would have preferred if the teacher had pointed out all of my mistakes so I didn't keep making them and getting marked off for them in the future, or being looked down upon in something like a resume where the impression I make really counts.

By being told to only correct a few of the errors, it's not only sending the signal that the teacher doesn't knwo the others aren't wrong, but it's sending the child the signal that because some were picked up and not others, that those other things weren't wrong or else the teacher would have pointed them out.

For instance, we had one quiz that was returned to the queue after having been online in the past. But it had some mis-sepllings in it that needed to be fixed before it could go back online. The author's argument was that because the quiz had been put online by the first author, the mis-spellings didn't matter. It's the same thing if the teacher doesn't correct all/any of the errors when he or she sees them.

Here in Canada, I think the problem can be traced back to philosphies of teaching - many current teachers are graduates of the whole language system which swept North America in the seventies and eighties. Therefore, they themselves have poor writing skills. Whole language came into favour as a reaction to the phonics which had gone before, and I believe was a case of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. There was a lot wrong with the old rote learning system, and there is a lot wrong with whole language (which is beginning to be admitted). Some sort of hybrid, where creativity, content, spelling and grammar are ALL emphasized, would serve our children best, but of course it's so much more fun to fight about it.

Hallelujah to that. This is one of the theories that did in a lot of the good things from the older system.

I had absolutely no grammar instruction except one afternoon when we had an older substitute teacher teach us how to diagram sentences. I mean, after the age of ten or so, I cannot remember being told anything about the basic parts of speech and if I had not been an avid reader of perhaps five books a week, I'd have never managed.
I'm in the same age bracket as a few of you, and the theories there were that we'd be traumatized by rote memorizing. Anyone who passed a basic test of their English was promoted and went into higher level courses without knowing anything about the structure.

Even today, on the eve of my teaching credential's last phase, I see there are some of those things out there preventing us from asking a kid to build on his or her knowledge of things and build a structure and those who can do it perform a thousand times better on standardized tests!
You cannot wing it on those, you have to have memorized countless words or roots.

I'm also seeing candidates who will be teaching English here in California who make the most basic errors like the greengrocer's plural on presentations. This is avoidable as they are typed into a word processor, so, how is it that we see on the screen, 'teacher's' instead of 'teachers' for the plural? Yikes!

Yet, many of them are rather rigid and demanding of kids for much more abstract concepts of alliteration, metaphors and other sundry items. These are the current standards.
I do not wish to teach English in the current system except to non-natives as that's what I prefer.
The 'normal' English classes in American schools don't seem to base themselves on practical matters.

Another problem I'm seeing is that when you type with auto spellchecker, you don't 'feel' the difference. I once compared it to the kid learning potty training who wore the ultra absorbent diapers until he was four.
He couldn't tell if he was wet or not!

Well, it's the same thing. If you were raised on a manual typewriter and had to watch for misspelled words that would cost you time and effort, you felt the misspelled word.
Now on a word processor, our eyes and hands get lazy.
How can someone be expected to recognize the 'ie' vs 'ei' mistake, (which is hard to do for many of us, even those who spell well), if your word processor has fixed it for you?

So, those are some of my pet peeves too.

Bloomsby, English majors in the States sometimes have a bit of a reputation of being undecided on what they want to do. This is perhaps undeserved and some of my best friends were English majors, but, I have noticed a lot of students going into teaching English because it's a necessary commodity.
If they've been coddled a bit much as some of the writing in this thread suggests and encouraged to think these skills are secondary to what they're actually writing, then you'll get some major errors and denial about those.

Whole language makes me shudder! It was the biggest excuse for laziness I've ever seen.
I remember substitute teaching for one teacher whose entire Gr 8 Language program consisted of silent reading and answering questions. I couldn't believe, flipping through her day book, that this had been going on for as far as there were pages in the book!
I remember taking over one class of Gr 8's for a three month stint (teacher retired early). The first set of essays I marked set up a huge hue and cry because I marked for grammar and spelling. One girl, whose 3 page essay was one huge paragraph, was furious because she's always gotten an A. She was creative and had some great ideas, but absolutely no concept of coventions and structure. I swear I taught that class more about grammar in the three months that I was there then they'd learned the previous 7 months.
I actually had one come back to visit the next year and thank me for it, because she was finding high school easier because of what she'd learned from me.

I actually never learned how to diagram a sentence. I had one teacher in 9th grade English show us once, but that was more of an 'FYI' and not something we had to learn for class.

I think I actually learned what a verb was in French class... But my mom says I learned from playing 'Madlibs.'

When I taught art appreciation in a large state college in the USA, I had about one hundred fifty people in there. I decided that I'd see if I could at least get them to improve their writing via writing about their surroundings and the architecture and art. It really helped them as I gather they'd never had anyone take the time. However, I probably spent twice the time grading their papers than anyone sane would have. Imagine the number of papers that meant!
I gave them a few sheets of major errors to avoid and many of them thanked me as it helped them in their work etc.

I had many adults returning to school after years out there working and no one had ever taken the time to help them.
I also said there wasn't any time to lose on saying why they hadn't done it in the past, but just to go ahead and do it now.

I didn't mean that diagramming sentences was any big deal, but that no one had bothered with verbs, nouns and the structural things during all those years.

I never had a foreign language in high school so I don't know if that would have helped or not.

I think we may be using sweeping generalizations here, though. I know that my own children, now teens, have gotten at least some basic grammar in school. They don't diagram sentences, but they do know what nouns and verbs are, can make sure that the verb agrees with the subject, that the tenses all match up, etc. They know what a complete sentence is. Spelling and punctuation have been pounded into them, to my satisfaction, except for a few omissions - a semicolon may as well be a cuneiform, for all they have been taught. Vocabulary - well, no, they have not covered every word in the English language, but they have had a list of twenty words, every week from grade one to grade eight, that they darn well understand the meaning and use of by the end of the week.
My son is in grade eleven, and every paper, for every subject, is marked for errors in English.
This is a small rural school. I don't know whether that counts in our favour or against us.

I will say that taking French in high school taught me more about English grammar than it did about French - it was very useful and I wish that languages were required. Here in our school, French is not even offered in high school, though that has more to do with the odd mind set of rural Alberta than the quality of teaching, I think.

I was visiting a friend and one of her house guests is a 16yr old grade ten student.

We were talking and I used the word Sedate and she had no idea what it meant.

I was stunned and she wasn't even embarrassed that she didn't know what it meant.

I think they had better start teaching it like they did when I went to school or we will have a whole generation who can barely write English never mind being able to fill out a job application or write a report or write a personal thank you note.etc.


I hope the powers that be realize they need to change the way teachers teach and get tough.

PF

Well, all I can say is that I wish I had a dollar for every Literature quiz that I sent back to a quiz-maker with a message saying that they need to use a capital letter to start a sentence and that sentences need a punctuation mark (a period or full stop, or question mark, etc) at the end.

I don't know whether they don't know any better or whether they are just lazy!

I think there has been a bit of a turn-around in Ontario schools, and a big move away from whole language. However grammar is not taught as much as it was when I went to school.
As to the basic lack of capitals and punctuation, I blame MSN for that as much as anything. I don't think too many kids get through school without knowing at least that much, but they get out of the habit of using them in online chat situations, and then move into the belief that they're really not needed.
I've had a few replies from quiz makers that say things like 'Come on, this is supposed to be fun. I feel like I'm back in school.'

Grammar figured pretty prominently in my schooling, which wasn't all THAT long ago. I never learned to diagram a sentence, but the parts of the sentence were made pretty clear to me. But I was generally in advanced English classes, and the expectations were higher for us, so we WERE graded on grammar as well as content, and I honestly don't know if that was true outside the "AP" (advanced placement) world.

These days most of the people I associate with are older than I am by considerable years or are my close friends from school and their spouses. I find that it is the older folks who have more trouble with grammar, and I am constantly correcting my co-workers' correspondence.

But I also deal on a semi-regular basis with youngsters, generally via other forums where grammar is not so strictly followed. And I have one thing to say about that. It isn't pretty. But I don't think it can be blamed entirely on the internet, cell phones, etc. I was a geek, and a lot of chatspeak is an extension of geekspeak from the pre-world-wide-web days. We didn't take it to the extremes it is now, and I think that is related to the crux of the matter. Geekspeak was a kind of shorthand for typing and bandwidth savings. And we didn't let it effect our lives the way it seems to have done recently. But we were geeks, after all. When it became the realm of "average" people, average things happened to it. (By average I'm not making a reference to intelligence, just specific interests, jargon, etc.)

Diagramming sentences is a very common thing in schools here. I learned how to diagram a sentence in 4th grade. Teachers emphasize a lot on syntax and kids study grammar from the 4th grade to 10th grade (we call it 3rd year of high school here, the last two years of high school are dedicated mostly to Literature). I always thought that was the common thing, and I never found Spanish syntax very difficult. We would also get long lists of new words to learn in elementary school, but I specifically remember the emphasis on syntax. I also remember most kids hated it and thought it was useless to learn what a subject and a predicate mean, but I think that the reason why they hated doing syntax analysis was probably because they made us practice a lot.

My sixth grade teacher was FANATICAL about grammer, and we diagrammed sentences every day. We also spent an inordinate amount of time drawing the parts of flowers and plants. I will never again be confused between a pistil and a stamen.

I missed the idiocy that is whole language learning by some years, fortunately. It strikes me as a particularly lazy way of teaching. Kids may be smarter than we often give them credit for, but they aren't born knowing a language. They still have to be taught SOME rules.

We've been considering homeschooling when our girls get older. (the oldest starts preschool in a couple weeks. ) Last I heard, California schools ranked 40-somethingth in the nation, and the odds of them getting a good education with ranking like that seem a little long to me. Ironically, the homeschooling programs around here are better in a lot of ways than the conventional schools--better organized, more strictly supervised, better curriculum, etc. And the homeschooled kids can partipate in the school activities like sports.
Anyway, I know that at least if I home school my kids, they'll be able to read. And will incidentally be a heck of a lot safer.

What is diagramming a sentence? I don't think I've ever been taught this and I've never heard of it before - unless it is called something different in Australia.

Phew, glad you asked, MG! I think I get it and am pretty sure I was taught it but don't think it had a name as such.

With schools seeming to lack these days it must be down to the parent to ensure the kids are getting that bit of extra 'teaching' either from themselves or a tutor if they don't think they are up to it themselves. But getting your kid to read aloud to you or write a simple story must give them an idea where they are at.

I don't know the term either, just had to guess at the meaning and came up with 'construction'. I am not sure if it is correct.

I think it is called Parsing, isn't it?