Dealing with tertiary level language worry

Both are at the core of the “expression” and “understanding” that we have come to accept as indispensable to learning, but the absence of these at the tertiary level is no mystery.

The simple reason for this absence is that competencies in both these areas are acquired over time through cumulative experience in each and you can’t simply hope to be able to “put a proper sentence together” or show competence in understanding a writer’s message or analyse it critically without having been grounded in both over time.

To write proper sentences as habit you will have had to be nurtured in the appropriate language environment, continually so, and this would have had to be reinforced by the mechanics of the language of which Nesfield’s Outline of English Grammar, inter alia, is ample facilitator.

Continuing reinforcement of the rules as in a basic text like Nesfield is key to language development and enough emphasis cannot be placed on the practicum aspect, both of the oral and written, to make “writing a proper sentence” a matter of habit. In time this becomes your personal culture in language of which you will give ample demonstration at the tertiary level.

In terms of cognitive capacity, basic comprehension exercises will provide the grounding but to prepare for the rigour of tertiary education the student must be exposed to the skills of critical thinking, beginning with understanding how ideas may support a central message and correspondingly how to coordinate ideas around a central message.

But the student must go beyond this into applying critical insight to those ideas, determining their merits and demerits.

Knowledge must not be merely accepted but interrogated and this is how students grow and develop through language in a way that is suited for the demands of tertiary education.

It is time that practitioners in tertiary education begin to recognise the need for this basic grounding in language and include relevant courses in their programmes, for no matter how sophisticated their core offerings are, a student without these basic competencies in language can never hope to succeed in a way that is required at this level.

DR ERROL BENJAMIN via email