Confronted with a generation of students lacking even a basic understanding of grammar and punctuation, an Australian university has introduced a remedial course to teach first years "language mechanics".

The course at Monash University in Melbourne has been introduced to help the nine out of ten students who cannot identify a noun when they start their degrees, said Baden Eunson, lecturer at the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies.

He told The Australian newspaper: "If you ask them to identify adjectives and other parts of a sentence, only about one per cent can manage."

His comments echo those of Caron Dann, another Monash academic, who said, in a column in Times Higher Education in September, that the majority of her 500 students had little understanding of grammar.

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Mr Eunson said the remedial course was "mainly covering material that should have been covered in school but wasn't".

Citing a 2003 study that attributed illiteracy among young people to a "collapse of standards" in Australian high schools, he said he questioned the choice of Sydney University professor Peter Freebody to write the framing document for the national English curriculum.

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"The critical literacy approach hammered out by Professor Freebody ... promoted a socio-political view of the world at the expense of basic literacy," he said, predicting that there would be little improvement in school leavers' literacy as a result.

john.gill@tsleducation.com.