Overseas Students Are Better at English than the British

British undergraduates are nearly three times more likely to make errors in English than those from overseas, according to new research.

A study of written work produced by final-year students revealed that, on average, they had 52.2 punctuation, grammatical and spelling errors per paper compared with just 18.8 for the international students.

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The research was disclosed on 4 October 2009 by Professor Bernard Lamb, reader in genetics at Imperial College London, and president of the Queen's English Society, after studying the written work produced in the year by his students. It will be published in the society's journal, Quest, next month.

Spelling errors included "flourescence" for "fluorescence", "alot" for "a lot", "seperate" for "separate", "yeild" for "yield", "relevent" for "relevant", "introduications" for "introductions" and "pail vains" for "pale veins".

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"There were hundreds of cases of disagreement in number between subjects and verbs (such as 'male sterility are useful', 'fertility in most breeds have low heritability')," added the research. "Wrong plurals – such as 'varietys', 'two theorys' and 'the two hypothesis' – were common," it added.

Grammatical errors included "done by my partner and I" and "a women".

On punctuation, it added: "Semicolons were often used to introduce lists. Very few students used colons.

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"Some never used possessive apostrophes, and there were many apostrophes used in non-possessive plurals – 'the cows rectum' and 'the harem's of seals'.

"There were incomplete sentences, lacking a finite verb or a main clause. Illogical or ambiguous statements were frequent (such as 'Barr bodies can be used to determine sex (present in females but not in males)', 'pass their X chromosome to half their son' and 'these colonies are then cross with another yeast strain')."

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The Queen's English Society blames the errors on a "widespread deterioration in standards" when it comes to promoting the English language in schools.

"We need to raise the very poor standards of English of the home students by more demanding syllabuses and exams, more explicit teaching and examining of English (including grammar, spelling and punctuation) and by consistent correction of errors by teachers of all subjects," Professor Lamb said.

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In his article, he adds: "I conclude that many of our schools do a poor job of motivating their pupils to take English standards seriously and are not teaching basic topics such as grammar, spelling and punctuation effectively. Above all, they are not correcting errors. One of my final-year home students told me that I was the only lecturer ever to have corrected her English and that she was grateful for it, unlike some others. We need constructive criticism and correction from primary school onwards. We need to tell the country that good English matters."

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ИСТОЧНИК: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/overseas-students-are-better-at-english-than-the-british-1797470.html

УПРАЖНЕНИЯ

Исправьте ошибки британских студентов:

1. Male sterility are useful
2. Fertility in most breeds have low heritability
3. Varietys
4. Two theorys
5. The two hypothesis
6. Done by my partner and I
7. A women
8. The cows rectum
9. The harem's of seals

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Найдите в тексте перевод следующих слов:

1. mistake
2. error
3. study
4. research
5. paper
6. spelling
7. disagreement
8. case
9. clause
10. subject
11. plural
12. colon
13. semicolon

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ГРАММАТИКА

Overseas students are better at English than the British

Отсутствие артикля the перед словом English указывает на то, что речь идет о языке, а наличие перед British – на то, что речь идет о нации. Подробнее об этом можно почитать здесь: Bus Drivers Learn 'Glaswegian' или здесь: The Russians Are Coming... for the Sunloungers