In an article for the journal of the Queen’s English Society – which champions the proper use of the English language – Emeritus Professor of Marine Biology Geoff Moore said both undergraduate and postgraduate papers were strewn with inaccurate punctuation, grammatical errors, and fundamental confusion between terms such as ‘proscribe’ and ‘prescribe’, and ‘affect’ and ‘effect’.
After marking papers at the University of Glasgow and London University for 36 years, Professor Moore said the problem lay in secondary schools – and he expects the poor standards to get worse.
He wrote: “We must anticipate that more and more British secondary-school teachers – the contemporaries of those graduates we have encountered – will not have acquired a sufficient grounding in the English language in order to teach proper grammar, spelling and punctuation to their pupils effectively.”
Speaking to the Sunday Herald, Professor Moore said that some students’ written English made him “throw my hands up in horror”. He traced this back to the move away from writing essays in the teaching of science in schools.
“A lot of assessment is done by multiple choice, ticking boxes, one-word answers, and students don’t get the experience of writing essays as they did in the old days,” he said. “Coupled with the fact that they don’t get things corrected accurately by their teachers. You sometimes wonder if they even read a book any more.”
In science accurate English is an essential, but a dying art, Professor Moore believes.
“It is a question of precision,” he said. “You have to be able to express yourself exactly. If you’re using the wrong word in the wrong context – there is a great deal of difference between a prescribed and a proscribed drug. It’s important that people learn to express themselves correctly.”
In response to Professor Moore’s criticisms, the biggest teaching union for secondary teachers in Scotland, the SSTA and the national body for science teachers, the Association for Science Education, agreed with many points.
SSTA general secretary Ann Ballinger said while she did not expect pupils or teachers to use the Queen’s English perfectly she admitted that multiple choice examinations had affected the standard of written English.
“It does cause difficulties,” she said. “It is less easy to use language if you are not using it regularly. There certainly is an issue here. It reduces the amount of time and effort spent on the language. Clearly that is a problem.”
Steuart Cuthbert, ASE’s Scottish field officer, said that in his classroom experience, science teachers were discouraged from correcting the grammar and English of pupils.
“Although I firmly believe that every teacher should be maintaining standards across the board, there was a thought in the mind of many people that my job was to teach chemistry or physics and have nothing to do with how that was expressed,” he said.
Mr Cuthbert offered hope for Professor Moore, however. The incoming shake-up of the schools – the Curriculum for Excellence – will make literacy and numeracy the responsibility of every teacher, regardless of subject.
Mr Cuthbert said: “There is a sea change in attitude. We are now teachers of children rather than teachers of subject ... Because of the current developments this sort of criticism should be minimised in future.”
