Every year, when the MATSEC results come out, we hear the government and the Opposition giving us their respective interpretations – each quoting selectively from the statistics and percentages to prove their argument is correct. Predictably, the Ministry of Education always claims success, pointing to those who have passed, while the Labour party pours scorn on the numbers, zeroing in on the many who have failed.

I’m not about to enter the fray on who is right, but I am going to state the obvious: for all the qualifications and certificates which teenagers manage to accumulate, the standard of both the English and Maltese languages is abysmal at best. I have said this before but I have to keep on saying it, because with each passing year it becomes clear that each new crop of students somehow manage to pass their exams without knowing how to use either language properly. And the problem doesn’t just lie with those who have sat for their ‘O’ and ‘A’ levels either; I have read emails, letters and even articles by university graduates that are shockingly written. There’s no concept of grammar and no idea of spelling, despite the fact that (with English) you don’t even need to dig out a dictionary any more… you simply run a spell check (You can check the exact meanings of words too with a simple click of the mouse if you’re not sure, as I do when I’m in doubt.)

Inevitably, I wonder how on earth these people have sat for exams, handed in course work and written a thesis when they are clearly unable to string a few sentences together without mistakes. There is simply a dearth of written language skills that is unacceptable in this day and age. I have often heard that lecturers turn a blind eye to the spelling and grammar in an assignment if it is obvious that the student does know the subject, but this is where I see we are doing a disservice to our future generations. It is disgraceful to churn out hundreds of graduates from our tertiary education system who cannot spell and who are unable to construct proper sentences in English.

I’m sounding like a language nerd I know, but correct spelling and grammar point to something which is fundamental and crucial, which is literacy. Throughout time, the only way those who were well educated were distinguished from those who never went to school was through their ability to read and write. We’ve all heard stories of illiterate people in villages who used to take their documents and letters to the local notary or the parish priest to be read out to them. Governments have come and gone since then, schooling became compulsory and one educational paradigm after another has been experimented with, so can someone please explain to me how we still have 16-year-olds who cannot write a simple letter to a prospective employer to apply for a job? Even job applications from those who purport to hold a degree can make you weep.

It is beyond a contradiction to state that you have a BA, an MA and the entire alphabet of other letters behind your name, and then not know the difference between (one of my pet hates) ‘loose’ and ‘lose’. I’ve figured out that this common mistake is due to the way the latter word is pronounced – the long ‘o’ makes some people think it requires a double ‘o’. However, not knowing the difference between the two words indicates someone who simply does not read – or else if they do read it’s perfunctory in order to whittle and chop a paragraph here and there from textbooks to cobble an assignment together. I will be generous and not call it ‘paraphrasing’.

Apart from a complete indifference towards reading, there is another stumbling block to the education system in Malta that is staring us in the face – the inability to pronounce words in English properly because badly pronounced words are allowed to slide even on our national station. If I hear one more TVM newscaster refer to the British Prime Minister as Cameroon (like the country) or CamerON, with a heavy emphasis on the ‘on’, I will commit grievous bodily harm on my TV set. I harp on this persistent mistake so much that I fear that I’m becoming slightly obsessed, but honestly I cannot fathom how a journalist cannot know how to pronounce a relatively easy name like that correctly when all he/she has to do is switch on Sky News or BBC and simply listen. I do realise that there are people whose ears just don’t pick up other languages easily, but please, if you are in such an important role, delivering the daily news to the nation, the least you can do is train yourself to avoid mangling up someone’s name. Net TV and One TV (not to mention Favourite and Smash) also have newscasters/presenters who massacre the English language but I don’t hold them as responsible as I do those on TVM. I remember a time when TVM was the standard bearer of good quality broadcasters; when all announcers and newscasters would undergo rigorous training and voice tests before passing the ‘test’ and being allowed on the air. They didn’t just throw people in front of a camera because they worked in the newsroom – obviously, not every good journalist is capable of being a newscaster. You have to have the right voice, the right kind of delivery and yes, it does help that you don’t confuse the British Prime Minister’s name with that of an African country.

Spoken English is in crisis in this country, and it doesn’t help that people can get away with speaking a kind of sing-song patois (“Ma, how shy!” instead of “how embarrassing”) because they know they will be understood. These “English speaking” Maltese tend to get a rude awakening when they try and communicate in places like England, the US or Canada and no one knows what the heck they’re on about. Try saying “You have the time?” and the answer will probably be, “the time to do what?”

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Some blame the paucity of the written word on the fact that the younger generation have grown up with SMS texting and writing quickly on email and Facebook. I really do not buy these types of excuses. Everyone abbreviates when they write informally, but surely at school children should be taught that you write one way when you want to meet your friends in PV (Paceville), but your homework and anything that has to be handed in or submitted, requires a more formal style of writing. Although personally, I’m such a spelling Nazi even with myself that my texts and Facebook comments in Maltese are written with the proper “gh” and silent “h” in all the right places. I have to restrain myself from pointing out spelling errors to others and I cringe and wince every time I see a word written wrongly.

Maltese is being butchered beyond recognition through sheer laziness, carelessness or simply a lack of knowledge (although how you cannot know how to spell correctly in your own mother tongue is not only scandalous but is an indictment on our entire education system). I disagree that Maltese is a difficult language to spell. Once you know the basic tenets of how each verb is derived from its ‘mamma’ (the root), asking the phrase ‘huwa x’ghamel?’ (what did he do?) using the word ‘kiser’ as your model (with the ‘r’ standing in for the baffling ‘gh’) you can practically spell any word correctly. I have a brilliant Maltese language teacher, Mr Carmel Bezzina, to thank for the fact that I still remember all these rules to this day and for instilling in me a love of our very expressive language.

Bad spelling, whether in English or Maltese, says a lot about a person, and none of it is positive. It says the person doesn’t read; it says the person is careless and couldn’t even be bothered to use an inbuilt spell check to make a good impression, and it says the person will probably be equally careless in his work. In the current job market, when for every job there are hundreds of applicants, it is no wonder that faced with bad spelling, incorrect grammar and text-speak, employers are concluding that many of these paper qualifications are not always worth the paper they’re written on.

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