The level of new university students: "The problem isn't spelling, it's that they don't understand how the language works."

BarcelonaThe mess around Whether or not spelling mistakes should be penalized in all selectivity exams has revived the debate about the level of students entering university today. Although on Wednesday one of the arguments used by the test coordinator, Pilar Gómez, to justify the corrections to the PAU exams was that students, "after 15 years of schooling, shouldn't be worried about spelling mistakes" [because they shouldn't], the reality is very different if you ask the teachers who receive them: "satisfactory" to "very disappointing."

"It's not the students' fault, but they arrive at university the way they arrive," laments Mariona Casas, a professor of language didactics at the Faculty of Education at the University of Vic (UVic-UCC). "We are all paying the consequences of a language teaching and learning that is not reflective. "It's a communicative approach that has ended up implying a lack of understanding of how the language works," says Casas. Similarly, David Paloma, PhD in Catalan philology and language professor at the Faculty of Communication Sciences at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), admits that the situation is not good: "The perception is that things are getting worse, they have a lower and lower level, and spelling is just the tip of the iceberg."

Paloma explains that although his students want to dedicate themselves to communication, "when you hear them speak in the first year, they do it badly." He asserts that "they don't understand basic things like voiced and unvoiced s's or the neutral vowel." Jordi Clopés, a Catalan professor at the Faculty of Education at the University of Barcelona, also agrees: "After passing the PAPs [aptitude tests for future teachers], the actual Catalan level of more than half of the students does not reach C1," he criticizes.

Although spelling mistakes are the most striking, Casas insists that the problem goes far beyond not knowing how to properly accentuate a word. "The problem isn't spelling, but rather not knowing how language works. In order to communicate, we all share the concept of competence, but this has led to a neglect of specific content and knowledge, and has neglected language as an element to be learned. If we don't know something, it's very difficult to use it well," she points out.

To simplify it, Casas makes an analogy with cooking: in the same way that to cook a dish we need good ingredients and know that in a cake we won't put salt but sugar, students must know that the language is made up of components and they must know them. "When I talk about these components I mean that they must know vocabulary, they must know grammar, and all of this seems to give both teachers and students hives," she maintains.

The language didactics professor still adds one more example: "When a child makes a mistake and writes plurals ending with AS and not with ES, this is not just a spelling problem, this is a problem of not understanding how the language works, of not knowing that this is a plural and it works with 0, in Catalan plurals are made with the predictive . and will always end with ES. Therefore, if he doesn't do it well, it means he hasn't consolidated knowledge that is very easy to consolidate, and it means we're not teaching it well enough."

A void in the middle of schooling

The three university professors insist that the fact that errors in written expression—but also oral expression—are so basic indicates that the problem is deeper and, therefore, more worrying than making a spelling mistake. "They don't know the basic rules of accentuation... It's not that they make mistakes with complicated words, like knowing that fluidal and lay They are not written with an umlaut, but rather we speak of them writing a future as I will do without accent and, instead, they accentuate they will sing", describes the language professor at the UAB. In the same vein, Casas explains that these are errors such as not being aware that a pronoun "replaces something" or others that have to do with connectors and punctuation: "A poorly punctuated text is much more worrying than a text with badly placed accents," he warns. worrying. They explain that they have found that there is "a stage of neglect" in the middle of schooling that causes students, despite having learned the basic rules of the language, to later stop asking themselves how it works and showing interest in them. "Resolving issues that in some cases had already been assimilated a few years before, but then, mysteriously, either because the language has not been used as much, or because one enters a stage of neglect, one forgets what one has learned." basic and by the time they are 18 they are not clear about basic language issues."

In the same vein, Casas insists that due to the misuse of technology, a lack of careful reading, and other errors, it is being seen that "when students embark on an academic path, they stop wanting to ask themselves how language works and, therefore, it is time to look for culprits: "The responsibility is shared. Teacher training must be improved to help them, but students must also understand that they must express themselves well and that they must produce oral and written products with dignity."