Hard times, or much ado about nothing?

IS English teaching in a state of chassis? Can schools do any thing about bad spelling, faulty grammar, errant punctuation? Indeed, should they? These days, it isn't just language traditionalists who are complaining about falling standards. The battle against bad English has been joined by academics and business leaders and by many English teachers themselves.

But it was the Department of Education's examiners who delivered the most damning judgment last month with the publication of their highly critical report into last year's Leaving Certificate English exam.

Many second level students leave school without basic writing skills, and even very bright students may be unable to write grammatically correct sentences this was the verdict of the people who, after all, are responsible for setting the standards in the education system.

This year's Leaving Cert results provided further gloomy news. The proportion of A grades awarded in English was down at 5.3 per cent it is lower than in almost any other major subject. Meanwhile, almost 8 per cent of ordinary level students scored a grade E or lower.

But not everyone accepts that standards are slipping. Fintan O'Toole, writing in this newspaper recently, ticked off "literal minded" examiners for failing to appreciate the "infinite expansiveness" of young minds shaped by the surrealism of advertising, television and rock videos.

John White, ASTI assistant general secretary, says good pupils are as literate as they ever were, if not more so. "What has changed is that a far greater number of young people are going through the education system, so you get a much wider spread of abilities. In addition, far more people in society are required to be literate nowadays, whereas 30 years ago, many were in unskilled jobs which made no demands on their ability to read or write."

There never was a golden age of mass literacy in the past just look at the statistics for illiteracy among older adults, he asserts.

In spite of the many changes in society, and in spite of the evidence of declining standards, the Leaving Cert English syllabus is largely the same as it was in the 1960s. A new syllabus should have been introduced last year, but is unlikely now to come in until 1998. The Junior Cert course takes a new approach, but opinions are divided on its worth.

According to Pat Hunt, an English teacher with 30 years' experience, the situation now is a sorry mess". And the Department, the NCCA, parents and, yes, teachers all bead some of the responsibility.

"The Department has allowed the three Rs of exams to dominate Read, Retain, Regurgitate. So students spew out everything they know in bursts of verbal diarrhoea. The points race sees to that," he says.

Hunt says the syllabus has been "codified and truncated" to suit exam requirements, when it should be the other way round. The Junior Cert course "wallows in waffle", encouraging teachers to "surr" and "zap" through the syllabus, selecting "tit bits of this, that and the other".

"Grammar is not taught along traditional lines in many primary schools. There is too much emphasis on workbooks, and the teaching of grammar in an incidental fashion as it arises. The primary curriculum has been widened to include computers, modern language, art and drama every one of these desirable and mightily worthy but at the expense of basic skills."

Employers, were of reading job applications filled with grammatical errors, have come to a similar conclusion. IBEC says many industrialists feel that basic language skills are underdeveloped even among third level graduates.

The universities, too, are experiencing difficulties teaching new languages to students who are not familiar with the grammar of their mother tongue.

"A lot of students find it difficult to write grammatically. Indeed, most students find it impossible to analyse a sentence grammatically because the are not taught this Irish school," says Prof John Scattergood, dean of arts (letters) in TCD.

"The real problem is in modern languages. It's very difficult to teach a second language to students if they don't know the grammar of their native place. Language in the first John Devitt of Mater Dei Institute, in Dublin, who has been an influential voice in English teaching since the 1960s, says students today are writing "without any kind of overall structure or an idea of where they are going".

You can't write well clearly by focusing on minutiae. You have to have an over arching idea, a hod of organising ideas before think about organising your paragraphs."

Students also need some awareness of words which goes beyond the utilitarian, he believes. "Writing spontaneously requires a knowledge of literary and poetic forms."

DEVITT worries about the over crowding of the second level syllabus, "a place where so many -isms are competing for attention. The syllabus is so pretentious, it amounts to a huge distraction for teachers".

In matters of good English, it is no longer the case that the English teacher has the "universal support" of the other staff, he believes.

Hunt says class sizes militate against the time consuming task of Imparting good writing skills. Allocating just 10 minutes of correction time to each of his 150 students adds up to 25 hours a week, on top of the normal 22 hour teaching load.

"I can't get around to 30 students per class on an individual basis. Teachers of English have to read widely and well this takes time too. Then we have to put up with the Minister's insults about the amount of time teachers spend in schools. No wonder morale is sinking."

But Hunt also blames the perpetual round of staff meetings, parent teacher meetings, class outings and talks for the erosion of the time available for teaching. We can't have it both ways."

The new Leaving Cert English syllabus may tip the balance of learning once more in the direction of structure and precision. Albert O Ceallaigh of the NCCA says it represents "a sea change" which places a much greater emphasis on the development of language skills.

One reason for the delay in introducing the new programme was because the Minister asked for revisions to include the teaching of more grammar, though teachers note the final version still contains no mention of "the dreaded G-word".

John White believes the new course will deal with any neglect of spelling and structure which has occurred. But given the plans to expand the Leaving Cert cohort to 90 per cent of young people by the year. 2000, he warns that "not all people will be able to reach the levels of literacy attained by an elite who attended second level in the 1960s".

Some feel that wider trends in society exercise an enormous influence on English standards. Society is not as oriented towards being literate as it was. We now have to decide whether traditional literacy is still important. It might, for example, be considered more important to be computer literate," says the ASTI English subject convener, Sheila Parsons.

Pat Hunt says parents must share the responsibility. "We have allowed pop culture in all its forms to invade our homes and habits, the manners and souls of our children just look at the sheer mindlessness and banality, of many television programmes.

If children live in a pop culture which celebrates the ugly and stupid, we should not wonder that they have little to write about in essays.