Why graduates can’t write English

Last week, a Daily Monitor reader sent in a letter to the editor in which he decried the falling quality of university graduates. I’m sure there are many senior employers who can testify to this. When young recruits try to write a letter or a short report, it is difficult to find whole sentences in their work. They will mix up tenses and write 60 and 80-word sentences. The incoherence in the essays of students and graduates of our universities makes one wonder whether such work would have been awarded any scores enabling transfer from A’ level.

It is very difficult to find good sense in most of the gobbledegook that they write in the place of arguments. In an essay on ethical issues arising from the development of the internet, one university freshman has written: “The internet has so many actors, each with completely different motives, exploitation of women is now a very great concern of its own and has put ethics on a different level (pornography).”

Another wrote: “People especially get exposed to many criminal acts like drug abuse, robbery and other forms of criminology and this corrupts their minds which sometimes leads them to also do the same but this can also be solved by censorship of the service providers and other websites before they give out certain information to the entire world.”Here, I take a look behind the smokescreen of successful schools, straight As and English language and literature distinctions that many students who in fact cannot write or speak English have achieved.

Poor foundation
I think somewhere along the way to university, young people have been badly let down by their teachers. Thousands of students who cannot express themselves using the spoken or written word have been short-changed by their secondary schools. This is what anyone who reads their unintelligible essays can quickly make of the situation. The schools these students have attended fooled them into believing they were ready for the next stage of learning. List logic and cramming that many students are accustomed to in history or economics classes in secondary school are key obstacles.

At O’ level school, what one needs to prepare for History (paper 1 and 2) were a few sleepless nights. I remember we had to memorize facts about ancient West African kingdoms’ politics and economies.
We made list of points which we only needed to regurgitate regardless of the quality of English in presentation. After all, one would reproduce the very sentences in their history book. Beyond O’ level, science students have the impression that nothing else matters in the world apart from differential equations and free-body diagrams. And no one in school tells them they will need to consider improving their ability to communicate whatever wonders they can do in the laboratory in good English (or another language).

Internet dependence
There is also a belief that there is ready-made knowledge and understanding on the Internet for students to take and paste into their assignments. Young people now feel they do not need to read or write anything of value for themselves from hard copy. With the advent of fast search facilities, they can look for what they need online. Their sources usually include websites like www.answers.com and http://news.yahoo.com. This practice goes against the time-honoured principle that one learns to write by reading well-written books, not hastily prepared blog notes.

Language proficiency

Unfortunately, there seems to be very little acknowledgement of the problem of low language proficiency in most of our universities, and no comprehensive strategy to address it. You will find a communication skills course in almost every degree programme in some universities. But the students go through the same secondary school routines learning things they have no interest in and which they think have no bearing on their professional life. They are enrolled on the course just for the credits it contributes to their earliest possible exit from university. Universities across the country are now receiving freshmen and women. Many parents will be relieved and happy to have another child enter higher education.

They expect degrees in law, economics, sociology, and so on. They may eventually obtain those qualifications; but they will not be useful to them if they cannot read, write or speak English. Most of the students we are letting into university based on the current system’s language proficiency standards are not ready for the demands of higher education. And the professors who exempt these students from the very standards that governed them at university many years ago, overlooking language proficiency in favour of heaping up knowledge, are simply taking a shortcut. There’s urgent need for our universities to incorporate language support programmes to ensure all students attain an acceptable level of language proficiency to advance.

The author lectures at Makerere University
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