It is more than satisfying that Indian students in England are doing better than the natives, whose forefathers ruled the Indian sub-continent for more than two hundred years. Not only that even students from other former colonies of British Empire have better English language skills than their English counterparts. According to a report, academics in England are of the opinion that many undergraduates in UK universities have such low competence in English language, especially in spelling, punctuation and grammar that teachers often spend time teaching the ABC of English to the English.
A great majority of teachers in UK opined that in the same classroom, students from India and other former colonies like Singapore and Brunei often score higher marks in basic English than their British colleagues. The report says that among the most glaringly common mistakes are in spelling: British students often use 'their' when the speakers mean to say 'there', or 'who's' instead of 'whose', or 'truely' for 'truly', or 'occured' for 'occurred' and even in some cases they write 'speach' for 'speech'. We can be proud that even class VII student from any normal school can have much better proficiency in English, given the type of spelling errors that the British have been found in writing.
According to an Indian teacher, he often found it difficult to decipher what the British students wanted to express in English, and ever in their second year of degree study, they use ‘atrocious’ English language in their assignments. It is interesting to note that falling standard of English language proficiency among natives have led the academics to ignore common errors altogether.
Ken Smith, according to report, a senior lecturer in criminology at Bucks New University, said that words like 'weird', 'seize', 'leisure' and 'neighbour' are regularly misspelt by native students and scores of students do not apply basic rules, such as 'i' before 'e', except after 'c'. Keeping in view the falling standards, some UK universities have already extended courses by a year to give weak students extra tuition in core subjects that they failed to pick up in the classroom. Writing in the Times Higher Education magazine, Smith said mistakes were now so common that academics should simply accept them as ‘variants’.
In the grim situation, there is a general feeling among academics that most of the British students completed their schooling without mastering basic rules of grammar and punctuation. While Indian students are serious about their studies, they are making mark at the international level due to their public schooling background and motivation to scale new heights. Many will agree that education has helped enhance the skills in Indian students overseas; however, many will also agree that a great majority of students from the poor section of the society in our country are still waiting to show their skills provided they are given proper environment and teaching facilities.
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