Do American students write better than British ones?

Sarah Churchwell, writing in the Independent, asks "Why can't British students write like Americans?"

For eight years I've been teaching extremely bright, overwhelmingly middle-class university students studying American and English literature, who achieved minimum A-level scores of three Bs. They are intelligent, skilled at passing exams, and most of them don't know what defines a complete sentence. This is not sarcasm: every year I ask my students to name the three parts of a complete sentence. Usually they mumble, "subject, verb, object" or "subject, verb, predicate". I have never had an English student who knew the answer. The Norwegians and the Greeks do. So do the Americans, because they were taught grammar, vocabulary, and spelling. The majority of middle-class Americans who went to a state school, like me, have known the definition of a complete sentence since age seven. (In case anyone is wondering, the answer is: subject, predicate - which essentially means verb - and complete thought.)

One source of the problem she identifies is something called "Affirmative teaching":

. . . students are taught how to give the correct answers to the questions they will be asked, and thus enter university with an entirely inaccurate sense of their own competence. These students seem to arrive at university expecting to have their existing knowledge and skills recognised, indeed "affirmed". It comes as a shock to them to discover that there may be limits to their abilities, or deficits in their knowledge - and they resent hearing it. Learning doesn't appear to be the goal. A colleague of mine recently received an aggrieved email from a student demanding that he stop using words in seminar that the student didn't understand.

The point is not pedantic. An impoverished understanding of their own language combined with an inflated sense of their own talents doesn't merely result in smug graduates with a beggared ability to express ideas. Sophisticated ideas cannot flourish in a linguistic vacuum. Expression and thought are inextricably linked: crude language permits only crude thinking. It's bad enough that these university students can't communicate their thoughts intelligibly; but those thoughts are themselves constrained by embryonic language skills. [...]

Somehow I doubt that American students have avoided these problems, but I applaud Churchwell's emphasis on learning grammar and reading literature. Read the rest.

Tags: English, writing, Britain, America, grammar