Poor quality of the written english of students in tertiary institutions in Ghana: Is school pidgin the (sole) culprit?

Abstract

It has become a truism in Ghana that the quality of the written English of students in secondary and tertiary institutions is poor and ever deteriorating. It has also become customary to point to School Pidgin (SP) as the main cause of this situation. This paper investigates whether it is fair to blame SP (alone) or not. The data analyzed are grammatical and spelling errors committed in essays written by members of two groups of students at Koforidua Polytechnics, where one group consists of students identified as notorious speakers of SP and the other of students who do not speak SP. It is found that to a very large extent SP is not the main culprit for the poor quality of the students' written English, that the real culprits are students' mother tongues and text messaging conventions, they have become addicted to. Two theoretical frameworks inform the interpretation of the data, namely Linguistic Relativity and Weinreich's (1953) Strength of Language of Literacy hypothesis