Foreign students are better at English than many British undergraduates, says a well-known academician in the United Kingdom.
"Those from Singapore and Brunei make fewer mistakes despite English being their second language," the Daily Mail reported on Monday, quoting Bernard Lamb of the Queen's English Society.
The British undergraduates, he said, have a poor grasp of English.
"UK-born students are more likely to produce essays littered with errors, such as 'there' instead of 'their' and 'bean' instead of 'been'."
"Many appear to have gone through school without mastering the basic rules of grammar and punctuation, or having their errors corrected. Even undergraduates with top A-level grades, who go on to get first-class degrees, make frequent elementary slips," he said.
Dr Lamb, also a reader at the Imperial College in London, is now publishing a diary of student howlers -- "Errors In The English Of Highly Selected Undergraduates' -- in an attempt to shame complacent British ministers into raising the standard of written English, the daily reported.
As well as common slips, according to the diary, British undergraduates made spelling errors such as 'effect' instead of 'affect' and 'sun' instead of 'son'; there're nonsense sentences and howlers, which changed the intended meaning completely.
None of the 75 third and final-year students was dyslexic and many had used computer packages designed to spot spelling and grammatical errors. The checkers, however, could not pick up wrong word choices. "There is not enough emphasis on teaching children how to speak and write properly. Public schools are the only ones still pretty good at this," he said.