Language Standards: What are they based on?

In this and the next issue, Australian Style presents a series of four articles on the concept of standards and the standard in language. Pam Peters, editor of Australian Style, begins the series by exploring alternative ways in which language standards may be assessed and taught. Other contributors are Colin Yallop, Arthur Delbridge and Paul Brock.

The standards of language use in the community are a recurrent theme of public debate and concern. Standards are rarely said to be rising. Rather "standards are falling" is the common judgement of consumers of language, such as newspaper readers, parliament watchers, and some who employ newly emerging high school graduates. Those actually involved in the making of media or public messages, or in training students to write, are much less likely to pass judgement, or attempt to generalise about "standards".

At last year's Style Council, language standards were the focus of concern, indignation, anger and anguish in the closing session. Speakers who were detailing the style practices of newspapers, publishers, schools and corporations, seemed to raise questions about the language competence of employees and staff in their respective institutions, and the need to "brush up" the details of their English.

The idea of "brushing up" the English of new high school graduates unfortunately suggests that secondary education equips them with no very durable or complete mastery of their own language.

Yet the teacher who feels or is made to feel responsible for this problem could well ask whether highly literate members of the public in fact left school with their skills fully developed. Probably they gained mastery of the language in gradual, now-forgotten stages afterwards. One can too easily assume that the finished state was achieved long before, especially in the absence of evidence as to what things were like. We cannot properly say anything about language development or changes in language standards without carefully matched data over an extended period of time.

In establishing standards in education, language or anything else, one must first decide whether they are to be criterion-referenced or norm-referenced, i.e. based on specific details of the subject, or on the common levels of achievement in it.

Should we relate the language standard to the achievement of very specific criteria, such as getting it's and its,affect and effect, or there and their in the right place? They are hard-edged, readily observed criteria on which to peg the standards. But some would argue that such criteria are much too narrow, and would question how they relate to language competence generally. The mastery of language is a very complex set of behaviors, and we may well doubt whether a handful of criteria are valid measures of performance.

Either approach to language standards has its critics. Those whose approach is broad and in terms of integrated language competence (typically teachers) are sometimes thought to be inattentive to the detail of language skills. Those who focus on spelling and punctuation as the keys to literacy (typically employers) may seem to be concerned with trivia rather than the real substance of language competence.

Ideally the criteria used to establish language standards are non-trivial, genuine measures of broader language competence. That way we may hope to reconcile the two otherwise conflicting attitudes to standards.

On the surface, getting it's and its right is the small matter of remembering the apostrophe for one and leaving it out of the other. Deeper down it is a matter of knowing when the words is working as a possessive pronoun (within a noun phrase), and when it is a contracted form of "it is", helping to form the predication of a sentence. That grammatical knowledge is far from trivial because it is the basis of effective sentences and persuasive prose. Not even the best of computer grammar checkers can deal with such things, and writers will go on needing and using such knowledge themselves.

The difference between it's and its is also a stylistic matter, and the ability to work in different styles or registers is again an important aspect of language competence. It's as a contraction represents a relatively informal mode of communication, which increasingly has a place in writing – though not everywhere. Judging its appropriateness is again not something on which the computer can help. Rather it goes with developing young writers' sensitivity to alternative styles, acquainting them with literary and formal prose, as well as colloquial prose.

Concern with the small details of language can thus connect us with broad aspects of language use. It suggests targets and contexts for teaching, and methods of assessment which could check students' command of language particulars through examining how they put them to use. Language standards would then be referenced to a comprehensive ability to deploy the resources of English effectively.

Ideally it would more than meet employers' demands that students be able to spell and punctuate, and help employers to appreciate what had been achieved in terms of general communication skills. Ideally it would also demonstrate the willingness of educators to concern themselves with English as a language and medium of communication, not just as a vehicle for literary creation. In this way the opposition between the two groups could be neutralized an productively channeled into what is really their common concern.