The title of the article is "Txt msg n school literacy: does texting and knowledge of text abbreviations adversely affect children's literacy attainment?" by Beverly Plester, Clare Wood, Victoria Bell.
Abstract:
This paper reports on two studies which investigated the relationship between children's texting behaviour, their knowledge of text abbreviations and their school attainment in written language skills. In Study One, 11–12-year-old children provided information on their texting behaviour. They were also asked to translate a standard English sentence into a text message and vice versa. The children's standardised verbal and non-verbal reasoning scores were also obtained. Children who used their mobiles to send three or more text messages a day had significantly lower scores than children who sent none. However, the children who, when asked to write a text message, showed greater use of text abbreviations (‘textisms’) tended to have better performance on a measure of verbal reasoning ability, which is highly associated with Key Stage 2 (KS2) and 3 English scores. In Study Two, children's performance on writing measures was examined more specifically. Ten to eleven-year-old children were asked to complete another English to text message translation exercise. Spelling proficiency was also assessed, and KS2 Writing scores were obtained. Positive correlations between spelling ability and performance on the translation exercise were found, and group-based comparisons based on the children's writing scores also showed that good writing attainment was associated with greater use of textisms, although the direction of this association is nor clear. Overall, these findings suggest that children's knowledge of textisms is not associated with poor written language outcomes for children in this age range.
I'm having trouble opening the remainder of the article, but it can be found at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1741-4369.2008.00489.x/full or requested through the library.
I think this is a very interesting concept. It seems to me that, as shown in study 2, a student's ability to use "textisms" shows an awareness of "contextualizing" writing or in other words, knowing when it is appropriate to use "textisms" when casually communicating with peers vs. writing a formal English paper. Problems may arise when students cannot understand the difference between casual and formal written English, and may use "textisms" or abbreviated language in school papers, etc.
ReplyDeleteFor those of you who are English teachers, have you discovered this type of casual language in your student's papers (for example, like say... "ya" for "you" or "4" for "for"? etc.). If so, does this happen more frequently in English Language Learning students since they may not have mastered an understanding of the use of languages in different contexts?
Also, do you think texting is good for students since it may teach them how to separate casual, abbreviated language from formal, written English? Or does texting hinder students' abilities to write and communicate properly in a formal setting?
-Katie Flynn
Katie,
ReplyDeleteI am totally split on the issue, despite the information in the article. Although I haven't taught yet, my brother is in high school. Occasionally when proofreading his papers, he does make basic mistakes as if he is texting or instant messaging online. However, issues such as these are infrequent and definitely do not dominate his papers. They appear to be just like any other spelling error, caused by a loss of attention or lack of judgment.
I am honestly not sure if texting is "good" for students. I think that it assists them in communicating through writing-but often not in the correct tone of voice or appropriate grammatical usage. I think it really depends on the texter and his or her maturity level and knowledge. If students are able to separate texting from formal English papers, I think that texting shouldn't be a problem. For others, it only further blurs these lines of communication. As the younger generations become overwhelmed by all this mass media, I am really interested to see what other studies are done on these subjects and the results.
-Kristen