調查：英國孩子愛用美式英語

The future of written English will owe more to Hollywood films than Dickens or Shakespeare, if the findings of a study into children’s writing are anything to go by.

The analysis of 74,000 short stories found that their written work was littered with Americanisms, exclamation marks and references to celebrities.

Researchers who looked at the entries to a national competition found they were increasingly using American words such as garbage, trash can, sidewalk, candy, sneakers, soda, cranky and flashlight.

The stories, written by pupils aged seven to 13, show how fairy cakes are referred to as cupcakes and a dinner jacket has become a tuxedo.

‘Smart’ is now often used for ‘clever’ and ‘cranky’ for ‘irritable’.

Celebrity culture also has a powerful influence on children’s work, with Simon Cowell and Argentinian footballer Lionel Messi among the famous names cropping up repeatedly.

But pupils are let down by basic spelling, punctuation and grammar, according to the study by Oxford University Press, which looked at the entries to BBC Radio 2’s ‘500 Words’ competition.

Children stumbled over simple spellings such as ‘does’ and ‘clothes’ and struggled to use the past tense correctly, often saying ‘rised’ instead of ‘rose’ or ‘thinked’ instead of ‘thought’.

Researchers also found that punctuation was underused, especially semi-colons and speech marks. Some did not know how to use capital letters.

However, exclamation marks were overused. Researchers found 35,171 examples in total, with some young writers using five at a time.

The study of more than 31million words will be compared with future research to see how written language evolves.

Popular US fiction such as the Twilight vampire novels and films is thought to be fuelling the increasing use of American vocabulary and spelling.

Modern technology was also influential. Out of almost 300 references to ‘blackberry’, nearly half referred to mobile phones.如果一項對兒童作文的研究結果可靠的話，那麼比起狄更斯或莎士比亞的影響，書面英語的未來受好萊塢電影的影響會更大。

對7.4萬個短篇故事的分析發現，這些書面作品中到處都是美式英語、感嘆號和名人的名字。

研究人員閱讀了全國作文比賽的參賽作品後發現，作文中越來越多地使用美式英語詞彙，如garbage（垃圾）、trash can（垃圾桶）、sidewalk（人行道）、candy（糖果）、sneakers（運動鞋）、soda（蘇打水）、cranky（暴躁不安的）和flashlight（手電筒）。

這些故事是由7歲至13歲的小學生寫作的，從中可見小學生們用fairy cake（仙女蛋糕）來指代cupcake（杯形蛋糕），晚禮服的說法也從tuxedo變成了dinner jacket。

現在小學生常用美式英語smart來取代英式英語clever，用cranky來取代irritable。

名人文化對兒童作文也有強大的影響力，真人秀評委西蒙•考威爾和阿根廷足球運動員里奧內爾•梅西都是反覆出現的名人名字。

但是牛津大學出版社的研究發現，小學生們在基本拼寫、標點和語法上很成問題。該研究查看了英國廣播公司第二電臺舉辦的“500單詞”作文比賽的參賽作品。

孩子們總是弄錯一些簡單的拼寫，如does和clothes，許多孩子不會用過去時態，常常把rose寫成rised，把thought寫成thinked。

研究人員還發現，許多標點該用的時候沒有用，尤其是分號和引號。有些孩子不知如何應用大寫字母。

與此同時，感嘆號卻被過度使用。研究人員發現，濫用感嘆號的情況總共出現了35171次，有些小作者一次用了5個感嘆號。

這次閱讀量超過3100萬個詞的研究將和未來的研究作比較，分析書面語言的演變情況。

據認爲，熱門美國作品，如《暮光之城》吸血鬼小說和電影，促使孩子們越來越多地使用美式英語詞彙和拼寫方法。

現代科技對英語也有影響。在這些作文中，blackberry一詞出現了近300次，其中近一半指的是黑莓手機。