EDITORIAL\More gibberish.

GIVEN that too many Johnnies still can't read, there may be a place for national standards for teaching English. However, such standards and the guidelines for achieving them will be of little value if hardly anyone can understand them.

Sadly, that was the case with some of the 12 proposed curriculum guidelines for teaching English issued last week by the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association. Here's one example:

"Students apply a wide range of strategies to comprehend, interpret, evaluate and appreciate texts. They draw on their prior experience, their interactions with other readers and writers, their knowledge of word meaning and of other texts, their word identification strategies, and their understanding of textual features (e.g. sound-letter correspondence, sentence structure, context, graphic)."

All that may be perfectly clear to the sponsors of the guidelines. But we suspect most people are likely to view the sentence above as a pompous exercise in jargon, the kind of gibberish some professionals - and educators are among the worst offenders - use to either impress or confuse laymen.

The academics need to remember that their goal must be to teach young people to communicate clearly and concisely in standard English.

If the academics can't do that among themselves, they have no business trying to teach anyone else.