Popular US fiction such as the Twilight vampire novels and films is thought to be fuelling the increasing use of American vocabulary and spelling
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.
如果一项对儿童作文的研究结果可靠的话，那么比起狄更斯或莎士比亚的影响，书面英语的未来受好莱坞电影的影响会更大。
对7.4万个短篇故事的分析发现，这些书面作品中到处都是美式英语、感叹号和名人的名字。
研究人员阅读了全国作文比赛的参赛作品后发现，作文中越来越多地使用美式英语词汇，如garbage（垃圾）、trash can（垃圾桶）、sidewalk（人行道）、candy（糖果）、sneakers（运动鞋）、soda（苏打水）、cranky（暴躁不安的）和 flashlight（手电筒）。
这些故事是由7岁至13岁的小学生写作的，从中可见小学生们用fairy cake（仙女蛋糕）来指代cupcake（杯形蛋糕），晚礼服的说法也从tuxedo变成了dinner jacket。
现在小学生常用美式英语smart来取代英式英语clever，用cranky来取代irritable。
名人文化对儿童作文也有强大的影响力，真人秀评委西蒙•考威尔和阿根廷足球运动员里奥内尔•梅西都是反复出现的名人名字。
但是牛津大学出版社的研究发现，小学生们在基本拼写、标点和语法上很成问题。该研究查看了英国广播公司第二电台举办的“500单词”作文比赛的参赛作品。
孩子们总是弄错一些简单的拼写，如does和clothes，许多孩子不会用过去时态，常常把rose写成rised，把thought写成thinked。
研究人员还发现，许多标点该用的时候没有用，尤其是分号和引号。有些孩子不知如何应用大写字母。
与此同时，感叹号却被过度使用。研究人员发现，滥用感叹号的情况总共出现了35171次，有些小作者一次用了5个感叹号。
这次阅读量超过3100万个词的研究将和未来的研究作比较，分析书面语言的演变情况。
据认为，热门美国作品，如《暮光之城》吸血鬼小说和电影，促使孩子们越来越多地使用美式英语词汇和拼写方法。
现代科技对英语也有影响。在这些作文中，blackberry一词出现了近300次，其中近一半指的是黑莓手机。
entry: 参赛作品
stumble: 犯错误
underuse: 未充分利用