A* in GCSE English but can't spell - even at Harrow!

[speedymama]

I sniggered when I read this .

I thought that one of reasons that parents pay exorbitant fees for the privilege of sending their children to private/public schools was that the smaller classes enables pupils to receive more attention from their teachers. Maybe they need to concentrate on teaching the children the basics as well as intensively coaching them to pass exams to maintain their position in league tables.

I congratulate the head of English on his candour though - he could have easily come out with some spurious line that the education his pupils receive far exceeds that of the proletariats in the state sector. I do wonder however, that if he is the head of English, wasn't this problem evident through the course work and essays that pupils write before they embark on taking their exams?

If we did a quick total of the number of spelling and grammatical errors which were not made deliberately on this thread we might be rather shocked. So why is it that our 'standards' for our own writing are so much lower than those we expect for teen-agers? Because we're writing informally? Because we're not being assessed? Because we're adults? Because we're writing under pressure? Because it doesn't matter? Hmmm....

My point being? We all make mistakes. Obviously if you are writing a formal legal document or a response to a complaint this matters. But shouldn't we allow a little bit of slack for a teen-ager for whom English doesn't matter as much as say maths or his girlfriend? And shouldn't we allow for the fact that in an exam they also are under pressure?

Since the demise of Latin and probably of formal English grammar taught as a discrete subject, written sentences in a lot of areas have got shorter. I think that is a victory for communication and plain English.

People used to think it was a sign of a good education to write huge long sentences.

Nooka, no, if they had brought the skirt from the market, I would assumed that they had bought it already and were now bringing it home.

assume - I blame the heat

Hmmm. If it "obviously matters" that people CAN use the rules properly in some situations, then surely they should be able to do so in situations where it has been impressed upon them they should do so, for example in exams. If they don't, how can you tell that they could if necessary?

Of course, soemtimes a piece of writing is more effective if some of the rules are broken.You started sentences with "because" and "but" for emphasis, and it worked. Because you know the rules, you can tell when a piece of writing still makes sense even if some of them are broken.

sometimes

Should it be a lot harder to get A*? Would that benefit anyone? Should more students fail? Would that benefit anyone?

How fine a sift does gcse have to be?

Actually, BWC, I think everyone accepts that everybody makes mistakes. The problem is that when an error is made, is one able to recognise and understand why it is an error and this is the skill that many today seem to lack. IMO, that is something that should concern us.

You see the same thing with numbers and the over reliance on calculators. Unless you understand the value of numbers and can roughly estimate what an answer should be, when you type in an incorrect value which leads to an incorrect answer, you will know it is incorrect.

Exactly, Becky. It's my job to tell my students they must use Standard English in exams and to tell them why and how. I don't need to use Standard English in this informal context.

But I don't want my students to think the way that they are speaking or the way they text their mates is 'wrong' because it isn't. Although, I had an interesting discussion with my GCSE re-sit class after reading from 'Unrelated Incidents' by Tom Leonard, an interesting poem about how the news is always read in Standard English in more-or-less RP (though apparently only 5% of the population speak in RP) and I was trying to explain that Leonard was saying that there is no real reason why the news has traditionally been read in this way except that we associate RP and SE with power and authority. But I was trying to encourage my students to realize that the news could (and should) be read in their accent or any accent to be more representative but they weren't having it. My students had kind of missed the irony in the poem and said that if the news was read in their accent then no one would understand it (!) or believe it (!) and didn't realize that they were actually doing themselves down by saying this. But there's also an irony that this poem is part of the syllabus for GCSE English and yet the exam board knows that students have to use Standard English themselves. [There, I've used some appalling sentence structures here. Another thing is chat rooms can and should have a sort of 'spoken' quality IYSWIM]

Also, does knowing that 'because' is a conjunction help you with that 'rule'? When you get to a certain level it is helpful to know the correct names for word classes (nouns, adverbs etc) but does this necessarily make you a better writer? I learned a lot of what I know about grammar only when I started to teach it even though I had an MA. And no, I don't think that means that it's easy to get an MA these days. Just that you can still be a good writer without knowing the name for a preposition (of course, most people know WHAT it is anyway).Still don't know everything I should.

But Speedy, language is not like numbers. It changes and its 'rules' are not logical. For example, if I want to do my job properly I have to 'correct' students use of 'alot' as this is not recognized as Standard English. How do I explain to my students that 'alot' is 'wrong' but 'sometimes' and 'into' are 'correct'? If they ask me why it's wrong my only response can be 'because it is'.

alright...is that now acceptable even though it's not standard English?

As far as I know 'alright' is alright and it's Standard English. Which just proves the point that Standard English is just what has become standard and not what is correct. It's interesting what does and does not become acceptable. No doubt in another 50 years 'alot' will also be OK.

Here's a link to the Leonard poem www.tomleonard.co.uk/sixoclock.shtml

I was taught (sic) that alright was incorrect but it is an interesting one, especially with regard to clarity of meaning

this is from an English usage website

The spelling "alright" is recorded from 1887. It was defended
by Fowler (in one of the Society for Pure English tracts, not in
MEU), on the analogy of "almighty" and "altogether", and on the
grounds that "The answers are alright" (= "The answers are O.K.") is
less ambiguous than "The answers are all right" (which could mean
"All the answers are right"). But it is still widely condemned.

Interesting Zippi.

I see your point BWC. The English language is indeed complex. That's why I admire foreigners who speak it as a second language and understand it well

Absolutely Speedy. And I'm quite happy to admit that we British are, in general, rubbish at other languages (IMO because of a lack of motivation rather than ability). If we were better at other ones we might well be slightly better at our own.

I really don't see the problem with the exam board setting the Leonard poem (great poem, btw, never seen it before) while expecting students to use standard English. I think you can say, look, here's some interesting stuff about who gets to make the rules, what do you think, while at the same time giving them the tools they need to communicate with other people who may not live round the corner and may not use the same dialect or variant of English.

And aren't your students entitled to their views on which version of English they'd like newsreader to use? May not be what you'd predict, but still valid.

It's just the idea that it's somehow patronising to teach children the rules that are generally accepted right now, really hacks me off. I've been a child in a sink school and a reluctance to correct spelling didn't do anything to help any of those children pass exams or get decent jobs or a chance of a future. Given the pits shut down just as they would have been leaving school, good education would have been even more important, not less. I mean, teachers thought most of the girls would be hairdressers - but if you want to run your own salon, you'll have to deal with all sorts of officialdom and an ability to understand written English will help you fight your corner.

Love the piece on the bottom right of that page on the army, btw.

I think you may be missing my point Edam

'I really don't see the problem with the exam board setting the Leonard poem (great poem, btw, never seen it before) while expecting students to use standard English.'

IMO Leonard's POV is that although we associate SE and RP with 'the trooth' there's no reason why you can't tell the 'trooth' in any other dialect eg Glaswegian. However, at the same time as getting students to study this poem, the exam board, AQA, as it happens, would severely penalise a student who wrote a piece of CREATIVE writing (or original writing as it's called now) in his or her own voice or an imagined voice with a dialect or using non SE of any kind. I think there's a fairly bitter irony here though I absolutely agree that there are some contexts where it would be entirely inappropriate to use dialect or non SE (in most of the exam paper, for example) and that AQA must test students' ability to use it.

'And aren't your students entitled to their views on which version of English they'd like newsreader to use?'

Again, I didn't express my point very well. My students are absolutely entitled to their POV on how newsreaders should speak, I just thought it was a real shame that they had missed the point of the poem (because they didn't understand that the poet was being ironic) and their instinctive response was that they didn't feel that TV should represent Britain as it is (where only 5% of English speakers use RP and most people have an accent and use dialect of some kind). In saying this they were saying that their accent and dialect was less valid than RP and SE and less trustworthy. How sad. We did have a really interesting discussion about it though and I got them to think about why it was OK for EastEnders and Corrie's characters to use dialect and accents (with no loss of clarity for those in other parts of the country) but not the news. TBH I think my students were trying to tell me what they though I wanted to hear. Either that or they really do need to be made to value their own voices more.

'It's just the idea that it's somehow patronising to teach children the rules that are generally accepted right now, really hacks me off.'

But who thinks this? No teacher I've ever met thinks this. And its OUR JOB to teach children 'the rules' as far as there are any. We HAVE TO follow the National Curriculum and we have to prepare them for SATS and GCSEs. And you're absolutely right that all students will need to be able to understand and write in SE on many many occasions in their adult lives. I really don't think any teacher, school, exam board would say anything other than this. It's probably one reason why most of us went into teaching!!

'I've been a child in a sink school and a reluctance to correct spelling didn't do anything to help any of those children pass exams or get decent jobs or a chance of a future.'

You might be surprised. Today, if a teacher didn't correct every spelling, this wouldn't be because he or she was saying, 'Don't worry love, you spell how you want to spell. It doesn't really matter'. Very far from it. If a teacher slapped red ink all over a student's work esp where the student had tried really hard then it would be completely counter-productive. The student would feel that her IDEAS were not being respected and feel like giving up. I certainly would. In fact, when trying to write in French at university level, I did give up the course for precisely this reason. Although I'd got an A at A Level, every bit of French writing I did at university came back covered in red and so I gave up. Of course students need to be taught to spell 'correctly' but a good teacher would pick out particular patterns of mistakes that an individual student or whole class was making and focus on these rather than randomly covering a piece of work in red ink. Also, the focus for a particular piece of work may be paragraphing or character or whatever in which you'd focus on how a student had used these rather than spelling.

But what did you think of the army poem?

I do understand the point of Leonard's poem, thanks very much. However, I still think it's possible to expect children to demonstrate they've learned the rules, such as they are, while encouraging them to think about those rules. You stand a much better chance of challenging any orthodoxy if you understand how it works.

If AQA (wasn't there a big scandal about them being crap some time ago, btw?) does demand correct spelling and grammar, how come people are getting A* while being unable to spell - the original point of the article cited in the OP?

Btw, don't see how the line that teachers do teach spelling stacks up against the argument that you don't want to correct their mistakes for fear of covering their work in red pen. If you aren't correcting their mistakes, how do they know they've made them?

There must be a way of encouraging creativity while pointing out factual errors, surely - make margin comments in a different colour for positive points?

Interesting debate, will ask my BIL (who is a drama teacher in a 'challenging' school) about this.

Another thing - Leonard and poets who write in distinctive, non-standard voices, such as Ben Zephaniah, all know how to bloody spell. You have to learn the rules before you can break them.

That's me fucked then.