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. Researchers who looked at the entries to a national competition found they were increasingly using Americanisms such as garbage, trash can, sidewalk, candy, sneakers, soda, and flashlight. The stories, written by pupils aged 7 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". Television also has a powerful influence on children's work, with Lady Gaga and Argentinean footballer Lionel Messi among the famous names from TV cropping up repeatedly. But pupils are let down by basic spelling, punctuation and grammar, according to the study by Oxford University Press (OUP), which looked at the entries to BBC Radio Two's "500 Words" competition. Children struggled to correctly spell simple words such as "does" and "clothes" and often failed to use the past tense correctly, frequently writing "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! Popular US fiction such as the Twilight novels and films is thought to be fueling the increasing use of American vocabulary and spelling. Meanwhile, fears that texting was spoiling children's written work were unfounded, they said, with youngsters only using text language when they were referring to a text message. Samantha Armstrong from OUP said: "Perhaps we are catching a glimpse of the language of the future." Chris Evans, whose radio show runs the competition, said the results were "fascinating", adding: "Who'd have thought that Messi and Gaga would be some of the most used names?" The passage is intended to   _  .
share the experience about how to teach written English in a correct way discuss the noticeable changes and evolution of written English in Britain criticize the influence of popular US culture on British children's language use show that British children have spellings and grammar abilities