Having run a celebrity gossip blog for the past four years, I could have predicted these findings from ScienceDaily easily.
Actually, I couldn’t have, and they’re fascinating (emphases mine):
The research, conducted by Dr Ewa Dabrowska, showed that basic elements of core English grammar had not been mastered by some native speakers.
The project assumed that every adult native speaker of English would be able to understand the meaning of the sentence:
“The soldier was hit by the sailor.”
Dr Dabrowska and research student James Street then tested a range of adults, some of whom were postgraduate students, and others who had left school at the age of 16. All participants were asked to identify the meaning of a number of simple active and passive sentences, as well as sentences which contained the universal qualifier “every.”
As the test progressed, the two groups performed very differently. A high proportion of those who had left school at 16 began to make mistakes. Some speakers were not able to perform any better than chance, scoring no better than if they had been guessing.
Continued:
She also stressed that the findings have nothing to do with intelligence. Participants with low levels of educational attainment were given instruction following the tests, and they were able to learn the constructions very quickly. She speculates that this could be because their attention was not drawn to sentence construction by parents or teachers when they were children.
She adds: “Our results show that a proportion of people with low educational attainment make errors with understanding the passive, and it appears that this and other important areas of core grammar may not be fully mastered by some speakers, even by adulthood. ..
“What’s more, the existence of substantial individual differences in native language attainment is highly problematic for one of the most widely accepted arguments for an innate universal grammar: the assumed ‘fact’ that all native speakers of a language converge on essentially the same grammar. Our research shows that they don’t.”
Absolutely fascinating. Not only do we have to actively teach our children the underlying grammar of their primary language, but we are not doing so consistently. Not only that, but we have somehow created a national underclass with such a goddamn self-esteem problem that they have never, in their adult lives, been willing to ask someone to explain to them how to process an integral part of the English grammar. Which, I mean, I guess I’m not expecting these people to be like, “Pardon me, but I’m not really able to create an internal sentence diagram for passive voice,” but, like, how do you go your whole adult life without asking, “Hey, wait, so does that mean the soldier hit the sailor? Or did the sailor hit the soldier? Or did they fuck or something? Seriously, though, dude, I never get it when people say things like ‘was hit by’. What the hell does that mean?”
What do we have to do to raise children who are able to identify a problem like that and then ask someone for help with it? Because that’s how you solve a much larger problem.
Also: when we’re rebuilding the elementary school curriculum to make sure that native English speakers understand things like the passive fucking voice, could we toss in a section about how Lindsay Lohan spells her first name with an “a” and not an “e” and you really ought to know this because you just finished reading an article that spelled her name correctly seven times?
Lastly: The redesign of Evil Beet launched today. I am pretty pumped on this.
