Literacy problems 'not unique’ to Chch trainees

Press, 12 September 1986, Page 9

Literacy problems 'not unique’ to Chch trainees

Literacy problems are not unique to Christchurch Teachers’ College trainees, says a member of the college council, Professor Wally Clark. Professor Clark has been in Australia for two months, studying the teaching of zoology in universities and doing some research. He said many of the Australian universities he visited had special units to help students with literacy problems. “There was a very wide recognition of an acute problem with lack of communication skills in their current students,” Professor Clark said. "This is an extreme problem, particuIdity where people have to write theses and so

on.” There were many theories to explain why countries such as New Zealand, Australia, and the United States had raised a generation with literacy problems, Professor Clark said. He thought one of the reasons was the decreasing importance of essaywriting in examinations. “Teachers were conned into believing that multi-ple-choice examining was a good thing,” he said. “Essay writing skills became very much undervalued, because they did not necessarily contribute very much to the end-of-year examination result. “As a result vte have ended up with a-genera-

tion of people who are marvellous tickers and scorers. “It is true that there are some people who are quite literate and have no problem. But it is also true that there are a lot of students who have problems of varying proportions.” Professor Clark said he had one master’s student who had graduated from an American university but had never had to write an essay before he came to New Zealand. “For a lot of people and a lot of professions it is not really very important to be able to tell somebody about the form of a sonnet but it is handy to know what constitutes a paragraph.”