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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