I've read a ton of student papers over the past two weeks, and based on
this batch and those from the last couple of years, I'm starting to get
the impression that a greater percentage of my students every year are
dropping inflectional suffixes (plurals, tense-markers) and finding it
difficult to notice the omissions when proofreading (I haven't been
formally counting, so I could be mistaking something I've just noticed
for a trend, though).  I've always seen some of this in examples where
the suffix isn't audible in normal speech, particularly  if the suffix
is well on the way to being a kind of fossil in the particular
expression(e.g. "ice tea" - you can't hear the realization of the {-ed}
suffix before [t], and "iced" in that expression is probably a unitary
adjective rather than a participle for most speakers who do use the -ed
in writing). That's absolutely normal, and over time the suffix-less
form can become the norm ("ice cream" used to be "iced cream"). 

 

What I'm seeing, though, are forms like "I was read this book" or "These
short story are...."; they're in papers written by native
English-speakers who don't speak any of the dialects that would normally
drop those suffixes, and the same students do use the suffixes in speech
(it's exactly the reverse of the usual situation, in which students
don't know they have to write bits that they don't say). If I draw
attention to a line in which there's a missing -ing, etc., the students
frequently *can't* see anything unusual about it; their usual reaction
is to look at it for a minute, then get rid of a comma (if there is one)
or add one (if there isn't).  It's that inability to notice the "gap"
that I'm particularly intrigued by. If I read the section out loud, they
immediately notice the omission (and I then tell them that they need to
coerce friends into reading papers out loud for them as a coping
strategy). It's not a language issue at all; it's just an orthographic
one.

 

I know similar effects can be associated with mild forms of dyslexia,
but I find it hard to believe that fully 15 - 25% of the student
population is even mildly dyslexic.   I realize this is starting to
sound like a variant of "Geezer Rant #325A; Those Darn Kids Won't Write
Right" but I'm curious about whether anyone else is noticing similar
patterns, or whether this has been common all along and I've somehow
managed not to notice it (which, given the rest of this post, would be
rather amusing for everyone but me...).

 

---- Bill Spruiell

Dept. of English

Central Michigan University 


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