Tim, after reading your post I then proceeded to read Jenny Allums post. I hope you do the same, but be prepared for being very depressed for the rest of the day.

Jenny Allum is Head of the SCEGGS Darlinghurst and Chair of the Academic Committee of The Association of Heads of Independent Schools of Australia (NSW).

Our children don't stand a chance!

I work in a secondary institution, and I can only, sadly, agree with this article.

Part of my work involves building and mainting an online Learning Management System (LMS). I am frequently presented with learning activities that are barely readable, riddled with appalling grammar and incomprehensible jargon, and (I would have thought) hardly useful in a classroom, let alone an online environment.

The worst offenders often seem to be the English staff, some of whom are incapable of such simple feats of punctuation as knowing the difference between a comma and a semi-colon.

Ultimately, frustrated with asking for rewrites, the curriculum manager and myself have simply taken it upon ourselves to rewrite these activities ourselves. For our troubles, we stand accused of "micro-management alluding to perceptions of professional staff incompetence".

What really saddens me, though, is when I (only too often) see students who, after completing ten years of schooling, are still barely literate.

In my academic studies, it was once suggested to me by my lecturer, that I got bogged down in subordinate clauses. I therefore shortened my sentences but still used such a form when necessary. However, today's teachers who purport to teach the English language, are unaware of what a subordinate clause yet alone a clause it !!

Two out of my three children have excelled in English and every other subject at tertiary and high school level simply because my wife taught them to read and also to have a love of reading. Much of the dumbing down of our language comes from hours in front of the idiot box. I know members of my wider family whose language skills are far worse than mine (which are pretty bad) and yet still have managed somehow to get/buy/bribe university degrees. Many schools are pathetic environments for learning anything other than how to survive out of control groups of kids.

This is so depressing. Never mind testing new graduates, test ALL current teachers. If this article is representative of the general standard, it should be easy enough to devise a teacher test based on providing a sample of appalling drivel and ask for it to be analysed and corrected.

Instead of literacy testing for graduate teachers I think there should be compulsory literacy testing of all aspiring university students, and a high 'pass' mark as a pre-requisite for being offered a place in any course. The standard should be even higher for trainee teachers. Why waste money on a tertiary education for those who haven't even acquired the basics of secondary education? Its just dragging down the nation, as this article illustrates.

Tim's comments might reflect the opinions of many who were educated in the "good old days" when English was taught by explanation of the principles, forms, and structures of our language.

I believe that Australia's media help to make those who are not linguophiles express themsleves in illiterate ways.
That's probably because a great many of those working in it lack competence in the correct use of English.
This, in turn, filters down to the listeners and readers and becomes the norm.

One of the emerging habits which fill me with derision when I hear speakers expressing them, is the practice of stressing prepositions ("what are they, Mum?") when talking; examples such as "...turning now TO the weather", "FOR the moment, we'll listen to.....", etc.
There is another growing practice of speakers using the redundant "DO" in phrases such as "we Do have a good range in stock".

Tim, perhaps these English teachers are victims of 'monkey see - monkey hear - monkey do".