Thread: Foreign students better at English than native Brits!

Let's thank TV!

Could it really be true that standards are slipping in merry o'l England???

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/liv...70&expand=true

British Undergraduates are worse at English than foreign students because they watch too much television, it has been claimed.

Home-grown students are more likely to make spelling and grammatical mistakes, a study says - frequently littering their work with errors such as confusing "weather" with "whether" and "their" with "there".

Experts believe the problem is due to teachers failing to correct basic mistakes in pupils' written work at school and the popularity of watching television at the expense of reading books.

Are standards slipping among British students? Tell us your thought in reader comments below

The study comes after a recent report found that half the country's leading employers will struggle to fill graduate vacancies this year due to their poor skills.

Dr Bernard Lamb, reader in genetics at the biological sciences department of Imperial College London, studied a sample of written work from 650 British and overseas biology undergraduates, none of whom was dyslexic.

An A and two Bs at A-level is usually required to study the subject.

He discovered that students whose mother tongue was English were more likely to have a poorer grasp of the language than undergraduates who had English as a second language.

Seventy-eight per cent of the 503 British students studied could not use the word "its" correctly and wrote "it's" or even "its'" compared to 25 per cent of overseas undergraduates.

Some 81 per cent spelt "occurred" wrongly compared to 55 per cent of overseas students.

Other words causing problems for British undergraduates included effect and affect, miniature and occurrence.

Fifty-three per cent could not spell separate while all overseas students managed to do so. Research from Oxford University and the university admissions body Ucas has already found that students are arriving at college less numerate, literate and knowledgeable than ever before, despite gaining a string of A-levels.

Dr Lamb, who is chairman of the London branch of the Queen's English Society, said there needs to be more emphasis on grammar and spelling in schools, with teachers routinely picking up on mistakes.

Detailing the study in the Times Higher Education Supplement, he said: "The overseas students are better trained and take English more seriously.

"They are probably taught it better and corrected more often.

"They have to pass a test in English to come to a UK university. For them it's something they have struggled with to get right. British students just casually pick it up and it's not taken terribly seriously.

"The National Curriculum specifies they have to be taught grammar, spelling and punctuation, but a lot are not taught it very seriously and teachers on the whole don't correct them.

"We must encourage teachers to get students to realise that accuracy is important."

Dr Lamb believes that the reduction in time spent reading and a rise in television use has contributed to the problem. He said: "Watching television rather than reading means the less you see in words." He added: "Punctuation is appalling. If I see a correctly-used semi-colon, it makes my day. Students have to have good A-levels to come here.

Probably 'cos they get to learn the simplified and basic American English...and us lot have to learn the real deal proper and difficult English like.....well that's what your fellow American RayCarey says anyways

Though I disagree vehemently with your motive for posting this (in response to the relentless anti-Americanism at ajarn.com!) I'm afraid that, as a Brit, I have to agree with the article.

I worked in an FE college in the UK and the standard of English amongst the pupils was lamentable.

As an example, one student asked me to help her with her covering letter for an University Degree course. When I looked at what she'd written, I found that there was no capitalisation whatever. When I pointed out to her that every sentence had to start with a capital letter she registered only surprise. She even had the first person 'I' in lower case - and this from a student who'd just completed a one year college course and was applying for a degree course !

The main problem is the schools. The teaching doctrine has become so PC that teachers just won't correct incorrect grammar, etc, for fear of 'hindering the creative stream'.

The result is that we have a generation of young people who can't string a sentence together properly.

Until the schools go back to teaching proper English and correcting incorrect spelling, grammar etc, then it'll only get worse.

The student centered models of learning are becoming a juggernaut in western schools, crushing the basic learning skills of reading and writing. Arithmetic is safe due to computers and the high need for mathematical knowledge in technology related fields. I have seen similar articles about the standard of English use in Australia and the U.S.A.
It reminds me of a quote from the movie 'The Princess Bride'. When the boy at the beginning of the film unwraps his grandfathers present and says "It's a book." the grandfather replies "That's right, in my day television was called books."

^ A superb and highly under rated (by many) film, pure class!!!

Agreed, a highly underrated gem of the cinema.
Inconcievable!!
:chug:

Yeah, too much Yank TV like Buffy, Scrubs, Houswives and all that crap

I like all of those programmes. :smile:

Only those that have never seen it. I walked into the cinema on a slow afternoon to see it not knowing what it was about, and returned the next day to watch it again.

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