Sixteen-year-olds are leaving school with a “poor command” of English despite having been exposed to the language in the classroom for 10 years, examiners have warned, expressing “great concern” at the situation.
Inadequate levels of grammatical accuracy, spelling, punctuation and expression were among the shortcomings flagged by the Matsec Examinations’ Board in a report on the performance of candidates who sat for the English Language Secondary Education Certificate Examinations held last May.
The examiners called for efforts to instil in students a greater awareness of the importance of English as an international language and not merely as a school subject.
“Overall, a lack of reading with its concomitant lack of thinking skills is becoming alarmingly apparent,” the report says.
The situation is seen especially alarming when it comes to tenses, punctuation and spelling.
Use of inexistent words or conjugations – such as happend, maked, hitted, don’t tooked, and they have never saw – were among the most blatant and frequent examples cited by the examiners to highlight their point.
Just over 5,000 candidates sat for the exam, of whom 62 per cent obtained the necessary grades for entry to post-secondary institutions, with 1 being the highest grade and 5 the minimum.
Only 3.6 per cent managed a grade 1 and 11 per cent a grade 2.
Nearly one in every five candidates could not be classified as their standard was too low.
Nearly 3,000 candidates opted for the more difficult Paper A through which they could obtain grades 1 to 5. Students sitting for Paper B may only obtain grades 4 to 7.
The examiners warned of the “abysmal” punctuation levels, saying that in a good number of cases candidates seemed “unaware” of the difference between a comma and a full stop.
Candidates performed relatively well in the oral and aural components of the paper, while there was a slight improvement in spelling from the previous year.
However, in the case of Paper 2B spelling standards were deemed “extremely poor”.
The report highlighted how free writing exposed the students’ major weaknesses, as candidates failed to reach the required standard when it came to essay writing, drafting an e-mail or even answering questions.
Mistakes that ‘happend alot’
A great number of both Paper 2A and Paper 2B candidates (the latter especially) demonstrated a very poor grasp of the tenses, such as writing happend, maked, hitted, don’t tooked, they have never saw. Some other examples of trends:
• Rampant misspelling of words in everyday use: it’s/its, there/their, hole/whole, were/wear, hear/here/her, alot/a lot, realy, happend, definitly.
• They likes or he cry were frequent mistakes encountered which demonstrated no agreement between subject and verb.
• Abysmal punctuation in a significant number of essays with candidates seemingly unaware of the difference between a comma and a full stop.
• Very limited use of the colon, semi-colon, exclamation and question marks.
• Consistent misuse of the apostrophe, with confusion over plurals and possessives such as my sisters’ were in the criminals car.
• Haphazard use of the capital letter, which appeared in mid-sentences unnecessarily, and the persistence of many in using i for I.
• Use of aloud instead of allowed.
• Incorrect use of will and the conditional would.
• Inability to distinguish between who and which.
• Use of slang American diction on the rise with gonna standing out.
• Persistent use of direct translation from Maltese to English.
• Lack of linguistic competence with many candidates showing poor mastery of sentence structure.
• Never-ending sentences as long as a paragraph with no focus.
• Few candidates capable of using the non-sexist pronouns they/them to refer to an individual of either sex.
• High degree of inaccuracy in a substantial number of the essays in spite of specific instructions to pay attention to grammar, spelling and punctuation.