10:51am UK, Saturday September 17, 2005

Examiners say they're concerned about the number of teenagers littering GCSE English papers with slang and text message abbreviations - and even swearing.

They found the words gonna, aint, wanna and shouda used often.

180 A-Levels 2005 students sitting exam

'Basic errors' exposed

And m8 and u appeared "all too frequently", a report into the work of 31,000 candidates who sat English with the Edexcel examining group found.

Among basic errors uncovered was the "almost unforgivable" use of i for the first person pronoun, instead of a capital I.

"Many concerns were expressed by examiners about elementary errors, often appearing in the work of apparently able candidates," says the report, quoted in The Daily Telegraph.

The report says that while some examiners felt they had seen an improvement in the overall structure of candidates' writing, "punctuation errors continue to be widespread" and many reported the "by now commonplace confusion" over words that sound the same, such as their, there and they're.

Despite this, 62% of Edexcel's candidates achieved a grade C or above.