Literacy, and why our kids aren't

My job is to tutor mainly English. I am called in the majority of the time to help those kids who struggle, but there are common links between all my students that are to my mind, a cause for concern.

When you see the same English errors occurring across students who struggle in different areas, I believe that this reveals a flaw in the system. And a pretty damn big one. I see amongst so many students, some of them quite capable – a lack of awareness of spelling, and correct use of words.

“Its” and “It’s” are as frequently interchanged as “there” “they’re” and “their”, despite having clearly different meanings. Same thing with “affect” and “effect”. As someone who has been an avid reader her entire life, I honestly cannot comprehend how someone cannot know that affect is a verb, and effect is a noun (although there is sometimes immense confusion as to what a noun or verb actually is). What concerns me the most is that it is surprisingly difficult to teach the correct use of these words. It is so hard to convey to a teenager that “they’re” is a contraction of “they are”, so what you are effectively saying is “they are house” (often students also don’t know what a contraction is).

My personal favourite is “could/would/should of”, as in “I could of eaten the chocolate but then I would of gotten fat”. A teacher in fact wrote a sentence using one of the aforementioned ‘of’ clauses at my high school, much to my eternal horror.

If you don’t know the difference between any of the above words, I beg you to find out now.

The fact remains that all of these things are wrong, and the fact that they are not drilled into children from a young age reveals disturbing things about the standard of English tuition in our school system, both private and public. I find it somewhat disturbing that I have to be learning another language at a University level in order to be learning about English grammar – or even having to learn another language at all in order to grasp the concept of a clause, or a preposition, or an infinitive. 

People often say to me “Oh Alice, so long as the reader understands what the author is trying to say, it’s ok”, but it’s really not. Often when you are writing something, the person reading it will not know you. All they have to go off is that piece of writing. If they see that you don’t know which “there” is required, that is the judgement they will make of you. It says something about a society that doesn’t teach its students how to write properly, and what it says isn’t good.

I desperately wish that it would be recognised that somewhere along the line we are failing our schoolchildren by not ensuring that they have a basic grasp of the English language. Particularly than teaching children which witch is which is not that difficult.