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English people aren't good at english. Wait a minute...

theowne

theowne

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Okay, I was reading through the paper (I mean the online paper), and I read through this article about results of the literacy tests. Look at this:

and that students whose first language is English are less likely to pass Ontario's compulsory Grade 10 literacy test than those who speak Hindi or Serbian.
Click to expand...

Okay, can someone explain to me how this is even possible? It's been a while since my literacy test, but shouldn't people who only ever speak english and are always surrounded by it do better in english literacy? It's not even like this is about how immigrants may be more pressured to study harder or whatever - this is just a measure of how literate, not brilliant, you are in English. How does this even make any sense?
 
It makes sense.

Most Students who come to Canada after grade 8 learn the formal proper side of English...

While most kids here learn some of the formal English but are surrounded by slang.
 
The literacy test is flawed anyways. My grade 10 year was the first year they had students write the test and we were used as the guinea pigs. Well turns out a bunch of our school's top students failed the test (these would be the same kids that got top scholarships to Brock, McGill, Carleton... 2 years later). Essentially what happened was the new curriculum interested a 4 level system whereby students could only achieve Level 4's if they went above and beyond expectations. So that's what these students did on the test. They went above and beyond. If a question asked for 3 sentences about a topic, they wrote 5. Well the second they wrote a word beyond the 3rd period, the question was marked wrong.

Luckily the test didn't count for our year since we were the guinea pigs (and I lucked out in that I had a wrist operation the day before the test, so i wasn't subjected to it).
 
Incredibly basic writing. Writing paragraphs, sentence structure. I was amazed that any anglophone would could read and write could fail the test.

jn, people like that eventually need to learn that doing something different than what was asked/required is not necessarily a great idea. I know that to some extent it is the fault of the curriculum. Reminds me of the students who thought ten page essays were inherently better than 5 page essays, and therefore deserved a better mark.
 
oh for sure. But when you're in grade 10 (so like 15 maybe 16 years old) and in everything you do you're told you should go above and beyond expectations, I don't think there's a maturity level there yet to know when to do it and when not to. They just did what was pounded into their head. Luckily it didn't matter, but it does now, and I'd hate to see how many students are failing it for the same reason. I'm not even sure if today they tell you why you failed, so potentially you could make the same over-achieving mistakes the next time and fail once again.

Mind you, almost every state-run standardized test is flawed so this shouldn't be any surprise anyways.
 
^I'm not sure I follow. What does "maturity level" have to do with writing a few paragraphs made up of properly composed sentences? I don't think anyone doing the testing is asking for great literature in the process.

Granted, not knowing how far one should go when completing such a test may play a role in attempting to over-achieve. In that case, students should just stick with the simple stuff - like the simple rules that have been "pounded" into their heads.
 
I remember for one question it asks for you to write a 5 paragraph about how dogs are useful to society.


My three points were....
-Dogs are man's best friend
-dogs help the blind
-police dogs.


I passed...

It is very hard to fail imo.
 
I mean the maturity level to know when to turn off everything you've been told to do before. At some point in your life you realize less can be more, but is a literacy test that is compulsory in order to get your diploma the time to find that out? I know that my friends that failed the test who were among the most brilliant students in our grade and some of the smartest people I know today were confused by the whole situation. Ya, it's easy to say "just write simple well-written sentences that meet the requirements" but if you've never been told to do that before, and in fact have been asked to write more than asked in everything you've done up to that point, that common sense isn't going to come to you in an epiphany when they lay the test down in front of you.
 
My school always had a "practice" test a couple of months before in order to get everyone use to the "rules" beforehand. I think during the practice test, about 40% of everyone failed one particular question because they asked for a "few" sentences which everyone took as write a paragraph, whereas a "few" meant 4, and no more/no less. Because of that (imo), we had one of the highest passing rates in the Peel Board/Province for first time writers (97-99% the last few years).

The said, the new "revised" literacy test is a super dumped down version of the original, so any comparison between older stats (more than three years) and newer stats (within the last three years) are a bunch of BS. They took it from being a 1.5 day test, to a .5 day test overnight and got rid of most of the reading comprehension. It's pretty much the same with the Grade 9 math test (and pretty much the entire curriculum in Math/Science now too).
 
most brilliant students in our grade
Click to expand...

What does brilliance have to do with this? It's a literacy test. How can less than 100% of native English speakers not be literate in the English language?
 
Do they still have that Level 4 bullsh*t these days? I should ask a kid about it.
 
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