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Queen's English? How do you spell that?

Hasan Suroor

CLEVER PARTY jokes about Indian and Chinese English may soon become a thing of the past thanks to a new generation of native British university students who struggle to write correct English. Let alone grammar, they are said to have difficulty getting basic spellings and punctuation right and, according to a new study, many are "incapable" of composing simple sentences in English without mistakes.

The study, which reads like a dispatch from the educational backwaters of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, is based on a nationwide survey of British undergraduates by more than 100 professional writers who teach in universities under a scheme of the Royal Literary Fund.

In their report, leaked to The Sunday Telegraph, the writers say they were "astonished" at the scale of the problem and blame it on modern methods of teaching — or what they call the "tick box" approach that undermines writing skills.

The result, they argue, is that even literature students in good universities lack the "basic ability to express themselves in writing."

"The recurrent theme is the confusion, embarrassment and fear endured by students who find themselves confronted with written assignments they don't understand and can't begin to tackle. The writers' scheme [which sponsored the survey] has exposed a public catastrophe," Hilary Spurling, winner of this year's Whitbread literary prize and an official of the Royal Literary Fund, is reported as saying.

Fall in teaching standards

It is the latest in a series of studies that point to an alarming decline in English-language teaching standards in Britain. This despite the fact that the number of students passing their school-leaving examinations with high marks is rising every year, thanks largely to an educational system that, according to the report, encourages spoon-feeding and puts too much emphasis on "displaying bits of knowledge" at the expense of developing analytical and communication abilities.

Employers have repeatedly voiced concern over the growing lack of even elementary writing and numeracy skills among new graduates, many of whom are "unemployable," according to them.

The problem of finding suitable candidates for jobs that require a certain level of writing abilities is forcing companies to move such jobs out of Britain. Recently, Amazon — the online bookstore — decided to move its European customer services to Ireland because it was not able to find staff with necessary skills in Britain.

"Amazon isn't a manufacturing company that is leaving Britain for the familiar reason that it can pay its work force far less in the Far East. The company is leaving Britain for one reason only: it can't find workers here with the level of education required — and that is very worrying," said Bernard Lamb, a reader at Imperial College, and chairman of the London branch of the Queen's English Society.

In an article bemoaning the "depressing decline in the standards of British students," he said: "The most fundamental problem is an inability to write English accurately: to use words and punctuation correctly so that sentences state the ideas the students are trying to express. The most shaming fact revealed by my surveys of my undergraduates' performance is that foreign students — whose first language isn't English — make fewer mistakes than native-speakers."

Here are a few samples from the report:

"In an essay about female employment in the 19th century, most of the sentences read like gobbledegook. Her tutor said the student was enthusiastic and articulate but her written work was difficult to decipher," says Helen Lamb, a short story writer commenting on the work of a student of Edinburgh University.

Novelist Jonathan Buckley on a dissertation submitted by a final- year international relations student at Sussex University: "The draft was so incoherent that it was difficult to discern what argument was being furthered and her sentences were so garbled as to be incomprehensible at times."

Crime writer Jo Hines, commenting on an essay by a student of St. Mary's UniversityCollege, Twickenham, says it "had no introduction, poor punctuation and consisted almost entirely of regurgitated and partially understood chunks of text."

Correspondence columns of newspapers routinely carry letters from angry academics and employers lamenting the state of British education.

One former teacher, tracing the decline in standards to the early 1970s, said he remembered receiving a letter from a student who wrote: "I am in my third year at Collidge." In "third year" and not able to spell College correctly! he exclaimed.

Most critics have blamed schools for the present crisis, but standards in universities also are said to be falling. "The terrible truth is that in Britain, the worst barbarians are in the universities," said one letter-writer, approvingly recalling V.S. Naipaul's comment that "the language of the universities has become coarser and the degrees have steadily lost their value."

Remember the apocryphal Englishman who, lost in the cacophony of foreign accents in the touristy Piccadilly Circus, screamed: "Does anyone here speak English please?"

Well, soon it might be the turn of foreign students in British universities to ask: "Does anyone here write English please?" Does anyone?

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