Universities no longer to required to expect good written/spoken English as it is “elitist”

[jacks11]

I have just read this in The Times. I am appalled! I think this is a retrograde step. Apparently it is to close the attainment gap between higher and lower socio-economic groups and also between white and other ethnic groups. Is it not rather insulting to suggest we ought to expect lower standards from these groups?

Surely, if we have identified that there is an issue in terms of literacy/communication, then we should focus on improving those in schools. For those struggling at university, provision should be made to support the student to gain these skills. For those who have a genuine SEN (e.g. dyslexia) it is obviously appropriate to have particular arrangements for that student. What is ludicrous is suggesting literacy and accuracy in both oral and written work is no longer required. To suggest it is “elitist” is, in my view, a travesty.

At university level you must be able to communicate clearly and proficiently in both oral and written work. It is not a “nice to have”. It is essential for many reasons. I fear this country is becoming devoid of all sense and rigour, sacrificed on the supposed alter of “inclusiveness” and “fairness”- utterly wrongly. Inclusiveness can be achieved in far more sensible and effect ways.

I don’t understand why expecting literacy and a clear grasp of written and spoken English at university level is “elitist”.

Why is the standardisation of discourse more important than the quality of the ideas expressed

It doesn't matter how good your ideas are if you can't express them in a way that people can understand.

My essay writing has been a steep learning curve.

Essay writing was taught in the Sixth Form when I was at school. Even those who were doing science subjects had one class a week where they were taught essay writing skills and were required to write an essay as homework.

@MrsHuntGeneNotJeremyObviously

Why should working class or ethnic minority English be stigmatised? Why is the standardisation of discourse more important than the quality of the ideas expressed?

Because language is important - words have specific meaning and it's impossible to read and learn or accurately convey meaning to others if you have poor literacy skills.

Why do you think working-class or ethnic minority styles of English can’t accurately convey meaning? Why should the meaning that you recognise as an educated elite speaker be more valued?

“Good English” isn’t better English, it’s just English that the elite recognises as its own.

Some uni programs have 90-95% international students and the level of English they need is shockingly low. Even if they don't have good enough English language score to get a visa the university is allowed to do their own assessment or have them do a short course and allow them to get a visa anyway. This means there are quite a few people already in UK universities with English at very very low levels. Way lower than anything you would see from a domestic student.

If someone is taking computer science why would you care about their grammar anyway? But you should be able to mark someone down if they are doing a degree i
Englishh or some other fluffy degrees with no clear career path. Those degrees offer no upward mobility for people anyway.

@MasterBeth
It's 'neither Graduate nor University', not 'and' - if we're going down the road of correcting people's grammar. Oops ...

@Fairyliz

It’s nothing to do with U.K. students it’s to allow more overseas students and their tuition fees in. Universities are no longer ‘seats of learning’ they are businesses it’s as simple as that. They get more money from overseas students so will be targeting them by lowering the English language requirements.

I can assure you that the students on my course who have the worst written English are not the overseas students.

@UserEleventyNine

Why is the standardisation of discourse more important than the quality of the ideas expressed

It doesn't matter how good your ideas are if you can't express them in a way that people can understand.

My essay writing has been a steep learning curve.

Essay writing was taught in the Sixth Form when I was at school. Even those who were doing science subjects had one class a week where they were taught essay writing skills and were required to write an essay as homework.

Are you suggesting that working class or ethnic minority English can’t be understood? Who are these people who can’t understand it? Why don’t they try harder?

When we seek to employ university leavers we are often aghast at how badly candidates express themselves on writing and in person. If they cannot write plain, accurate and clear emails, for example, costly mistakes and misunderstandings arise.

It matters not a jot how good their ideas might be, if a person cannot communicate them to another person. It seems we're meant to denigrate everything middle class, intellectual or elitist, these days. From fluency in communication, to having proper books in the house, to being passionate about ballet. Heaven forbid that a student studying an Arts of Social Sciences degree is expected to have decent English with which to communicate

But systemic changes don’t happen overnight, so it is unfair in the meantime, until things are better in schools, to penalise further those who don’t lack intelligence or aptitude, but whose spelling and grammar might not be at the sort of level you are expecting.

The point of Higher Education is that it builds on something. If literacy levels are to be improved, they ideally require improvement before the students even arrive at university. ESoL students are required to have IELTs Level 6 before they are admitted (often attainable during a [chargeable] summer course). Developing skills such as these is not what higher education is designed to do, albeit, IMO, universities have gone more than an extra mile in doing so. The level of study skills support available to today's students was something I had to do without completely as an undergraduate. And standards are still lower.

Foundation years are one way around this issue and universities are increasingly offering these in order to bridge this gap. It certainly doesn't seem the schools are going to do this job before the students arrive. It also has the advantage of squeezing even more fees out of this unfortunate generation.

Writing standards are a problem, and seem to be getting worse with every intake. Are universities dumbing down to take account of this? Yes, of course they are. And this risks devaluing the entire system.

There are three errors in my post and I'm sure someone will point them out with glee shortly.

[quote FunnyWonder]@MasterBeth
It's 'neither Graduate nor University', not 'and' - if we're going down the road of correcting people's grammar. Oops ...[/quote]
But I’m not suggesting that the deviations from “good English” I have identified affect the meaning of what anyone has said, my own typo included.

Meaning needs to be expressed clearly and accurately, yes, but that is often unaffected by spelling errors or different codes of English.

Shuddit be a freefrall then @MasterBeth? Spelling and grammer dont matter? Whaddabout books? Who is gonna edit them or duzzinit make any diffrence if their not spelt rite?

@skiclothes

I work at a uni and you would be amazed at the number of British third year/masters students whose grammar and spelling are worse than my 10 year olds, but markers are told they cannot penalise students for this.

My uni marks down for SPAG, even when students have dyslexia or something similar, because the marking is 'anonymous' and they apparently can't take it into account.

@IrmaFayLear

Shuddit be a freefrall then *@MasterBeth*? Spelling and grammer dont matter? Whaddabout books? Who is gonna edit them or duzzinit make any diffrence if their not spelt rite?

a) It depends on the book.

b) The very existence of editors suggests that the authors of books don’t get everything right first time, but we don’t say that their work is not worth reading.

In a sense, the universities are saying the same thing. We value you as a student for what you can bring to the subject, not your ability to follow a particular standardised code of expression.

@Tinydinosaur

I'm dyslexic and autistic, but was undiagnosed at school which meant, aswell as having those difficulties, I also lacked education in English because I didn't get support so couldn't even make a start on learning. I was, however, exceptional at maths and science, which was enough right up to university. Then all of a sudden I also needed to be good at English. Which is honestly bullshit. I understood the topics, I could explain, but because I didn't pretty it up, I scored lower.

Particularly in subjects like physics and other sciences, advancement of the field is the priority, they're pushing out people who would be exceptional scientists, because they're not good at something that is mostly irrelevant.

So yeah, I'm glad degrees will be graded on someone's skill in that subject and not another subject.

I agree with @Tinydinosaur. It's a huge shame that people are expected to be good at everything these days, so a step towards acknowledging and accepting students on the basis of what they are good at, regardless of their weaknesses, is a huge step forward.

Meaning needs to be expressed clearly and accurately, yes, but that is often unaffected by spelling errors or different codes of English.

But it often is affected. If I wrote 'it often is effected', that would mean something different. Accept/except; using the wrong one can change the meaning of the sentence. Discrete/discreet. Definate for definite; spellcheck often turns that into defiant, which sometimes makes sense in context, but might not be what the writer actually meant. How is the reader to know?

And then there's things like hyper/hypo, where accuracy really matters.

Why do you think working-class or ethnic minority styles of English can’t accurately convey meaning? Why should the meaning that you recognise as an educated elite speaker be more valued?

“Good English” isn’t better English, it’s just English that the elite recognises as its own

To study at university, students will be expected to read academic literature. Students will fail if they cannot understand the complexity of what they are reading. An academic will have chosen their words precisely, since they are presenting complex ideas - accuracy and nuance matters!
The higher a person's literacy skills, the easier it will be for them to understand what they read and select the right words to convey their own meaning accurately in assignments. These are key skills, so I have to disagree with you that "good English" isn't better English. We need to have a reasonably high accepted standard otherwise we might as well just grunt at each other to get our point across.
I am working class, so hardly elite, but I do believe that language matters. I don't believe that knowing the right words is a reflection of intelligence, but in life it is very difficult to get by if you can't communicate well.

Yanbu and as a pp said its actually more about making sure universities can get lots of overseas students in paying whopper fees than it is about widening access.

@NoIDontWatchLoveIsland

Yanbu and as a pp said its actually more about making sure universities can get lots of overseas students in paying whopper fees than it is about widening access.

Actually, I would be quite happy if some of our home students could write as well as the overseas students. And I'm talking about white, middle-class home students here.

Unless a candidate has dyslexia I think that is shocking. University is meant to be for high achieving academic students. Even somebody with dyslexia should, at that level, be developing good coping mechanisms.

@MrsHuntGeneNotJeremyObviously

Why do you think working-class or ethnic minority styles of English can’t accurately convey meaning? Why should the meaning that you recognise as an educated elite speaker be more valued?

“Good English” isn’t better English, it’s just English that the elite recognises as its own

To study at university, students will be expected to read academic literature. Students will fail if they cannot understand the complexity of what they are reading. An academic will have chosen their words precisely, since they are presenting complex ideas - accuracy and nuance matters!
The higher a person's literacy skills, the easier it will be for them to understand what they read and select the right words to convey their own meaning accurately in assignments. These are key skills, so I have to disagree with you that "good English" isn't better English. We need to have a reasonably high accepted standard otherwise we might as well just grunt at each other to get our point across.
I am working class, so hardly elite, but I do believe that language matters. I don't believe that knowing the right words is a reflection of intelligence, but in life it is very difficult to get by if you can't communicate well.

Academic language is very often opaque, verbose and hard to comprehend - not a standard to be aimed for. Have you read Pinker’s “A Sense of Style”?

I hope that the employers have got the memo on this and are going to act accordingly.

I have seen loads of times on here people say that they have thrown CVs in the bin because of poor literacy. I'm not sure I'm doing my students any favours if I tell them not to bother themselves with spelling and grammar.

If employers are not going to change their processes in tandem with universities, all we're going to do is create more graduates that they are not going to be willing to employ. Who may or may not come from disadvantaged backgrounds. So the much-vaunted inclusiveness will only extend to enabling these students to accumulate debt to keep university staff like me in a job, but not to get one themselves.

Surely you have to have good literacy skills to pass GCSE English Language, don't you? The language of some of the sources (post 2016) is difficult: 'periphery'; 'proximity'; figurative language comparing snowy stillness to death ( to think of one 2019 past paper). There isn't a foundation paper, as there is in maths, just fairly tricky texts full of references which well-travelled and well- read candidates will understand a good deal more readily than their less-advantaged peers. And sources taken out of context from the beginning or middle of a novel, which confuses, especially when you have to critically evaluate impact ( as if a literary, arts or football critic would ever 'evaluate' skill unless they'd viewed a very large body of work by that artiste).

It's strange that levels are low at uni, but the demand of putting abstract ideas into words probably compromises the expression. And for the arts, having to reference everything and trace ideas back to originators puts additional strain on grammatical skills. Perhaps that's why coherence falls apart at this higher level.

Academic language is very often opaque, verbose and hard to comprehend - not a standard to be aimed for. Have you read Pinker’s “A Sense of Style”?

It is often hard to comprehend, even for people whose literacy skills are good. Maybe there's an argument for academics to try and be a little more accessible, but as things stand, a person without good skills is really going to struggle.
I haven't read Pinker, but I just googled. Maybe when lockdown is over and I have the headspace for something more complex than Grazia magazine

Ah yes... I learnt to read aged 3 and was brought up by young working class parents. I have a degree in English Literature. That must mean I’m “elitist” because I am passionate about the English language. I think students should lose marks for poor grammar and spelling (unless they’re dyslexic).

Finding out about the concept of "linguistic discrimination" was enlightening for me. I'd encourage anyone to look it up.