"Students failing because of Twitter, texting,"

[DaemonSeid]

Student grammar failure: capability or context?

By John Timmer | Last updated February 1, 2010 12:09 PM

LOL-speak, fractured grammar, and emoticons are all finding their way into the college essays of Canadian students with increasing and disturbing frequencies, if a report in that nation's popular press is to be believed. Entitled "Students failing because of Twitter, texting," the report is based in part on the failure rate of an English language exam administered by the prestigious University of Waterloo in Ontario. The failure rate has now approached one third, up from 25 percent a few years ago, and a University administrator blames failure of basic grammar.

Emoticons and textspeak have apparently made their way into these exams, and the administrators are horrified. All of which flies in the face of some research that's only a few years old, which suggests that teens who are heavy texters actually have a reasonable grasp of grammar. One of those studies, in fact, was performed with Canadian teens, some of whom have probably made their way to college in the intervening years.

Although it would be tempting to ascribe the apparent differences to those between anecdote (in the form of college English exam scores) and formalized studies, the differences may really be a matter of what's being measured. The earlier studies focused on how the students were expressing themselves, and focused on the complexity of the communications; these came through despite what our report termed "informal diction and bizarre acronyms." It's precisely that informal diction, like replacing "because" with "cuz" and merging "a lot" into a single word, that's grating on college administrators. At the same time, liberated from the tyranny of character limits, students are apparently sprinkling commas liberally throughout the text.



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FYI - I don't believe Canada has standardized testing so it's worrisome that they are seeing this coming out of college students.


Beware of the creeping trend of anti-intellectualism that is upon us!