As mentioned on here many times before, the USA has caught onto texting a bit later than us in the UK, so the moral panics about texting and literacy, texting and repetitive thumb injuries and texting and attention spans have hit their media fairly recently. I'm only saying this again to cling on to a deeply pathetic sense of superiority over this one tiny achievement when, in all other fields, the USA beats our increasingly rubbish country.
This article in the Seattle Times takes a look at the ways in which the language of texting is leaking into some students' written work and the concerns that have been raised about this. It's a good article because there's some attention given to less hysterical viewpoints, and even the students quoted are honest when they admit that sometimes they're just lazy and CBA 2 switch styles.
It's also quite a good style model for an ENGA4 Language Intervention or an ENGB4 Media Text, I think.
If you are looking for more articles about texting, click on the texting label at the end of this post and you'll find loads more.
Today's Daily Telegraph upsets its readers with a report on new research from Coventry University about the effects of texting and mobile phone use on young people's literacy, namely the beneficial effects texting can have.
The research comes from Clare Wood and her team at Coventry (members of which came to SFX two years ago to talk about their work) and is part of a series of projects they have been involved in. Click on the texting label underneath this post to find all the other SFX blog posts about their work (and related articles).
To give you a taste of the reaction to this research from the Daily Telegraph readership, or at least the part of it that feels compelled to contribute to a message board, have a look at these extracts:
Really? These academics need to get out more and see the result of the texting game, many young people are not only unable to spell and write but sometimes incapable of expressing themselves. Wossit', innit' wha'ever, shu'up!!!
I can only assume the researchers are from the same genetic pool that fill in recruitment forms for my company!?
This is just an attempt to cover up the failure of the teaching community to teach correct spelling and grammar.
The bankers get (rightly) criticised for wasting our money, it's about time these pseudo-scientific research studies get stamped-out.
How on EARTH can "U alrite m8" boost spelling SKILLS? What a load of stupid HOGWASH.
Luckily, there are also some sane readers (OK, ones that I agree with) who have made a few interesting points about prescriptive attitudes to language change and the influence of technology, or about phonetic spelling actually being any use to English:
There have been numerous historical examples of shorthand writing that are reminiscent of texting, without civilisation coming to an end. It's just nothing new.
...you can always be sure with any technology that some will view it as the end of all things, and future generations will laugh at them.
If English was a vaguely phonetic language, the article might make some sense. However, since we have 40 sounds in English but more than 200 ways of spelling them, I very much doubt that texting helps.
David Crystal's Txtng: the Gr8 Db8 is a good introduction to some of the arguments about technology and language change, and he is of course one of the speakers at the Emagazine A level English Language conference in March. Have a look here for more details about the conference and here for more links to articles and arguments about texting.
And, of course, all of this glosses over the true dangers of texting that can be seen here.
This was broadcast a few months ago, but I've only just come across it through this rather splendid blog. If you click on this link and scroll down to 8.43 you'll get an interview between Dr Clare Wood from Coventry University and the so-called Communications Tsar, Jean Gross all about the impact of texting on young people's literacy.
We've covered lots of this here before (and you can do a quick search through the tags for this post or in the search bar at the top to find them) but it's a good one to listen to if you're revising ENGA3 Language Discourses or Language Change, or even if you're an AS B spec person doing Language and Technology for ENGB1.
That lethal combination of text messaging and young people has aroused the attention of several newspapers who are running stories on what they see as the latest developments in text language/netspeak. And the latest development is - wait for it - that parents are now using lots of textspeak themselves and that the youngers are finding this horribly embarrassing and creating new ways to express themselves to keep what they're really saying under wraps. It's revolutionary stuff, err... not.
The Mirror has a story here explaining some of the new text slang and one excellent example, which I will use from now on to annoy my own children, is H9, a term that is stronger than the letter & number homophone blend H8 (Hate) because 9 is one more than 8. Gettit? It's great, just like the bit in Spinal Tap with the amp that goes up to 11:(which you can watch here if you want to) it's one louder than an amp that goes up to 10. There's a bit more here too on a web news story.
There's nothing really new about all of this: young people (and all sorts of other groups of people) will always develop new ways of talking to each other in order to conceal their activities from those who want to listen in. Slang's history is often connected to criminality and concealment as much as it is connected with lexical innovation and fun.
The whole debate about text slang and young people's literacy skills is picked up again here on The Sun's web forums with some interesting points about celebrities and a dumb culture that doesn't appear to reward intelligence.
As if by magic, having posted yesterday on texting being linked to young people's illiteracy, a news article crops up saying that texting is actually good for you and can be shown to improve young people's communication and literacy skills. It's based on research by Clare Wood and Bev Plester and their team at Coventry University (the same people who brought you this and this) who say this about their work:
We began studying in this area initially to see if there was any evidence of association between text abbreviation use and literacy skills at all, after such a negative portrayal of the activity in the media. We were surprised to learn that not only was the association strong, but that textism use was actually driving the development of phonological awareness and reading skill in children. Texting also appears to be a valuable form of contact with written English for many children, which enables them to practise reading and spelling on a daily basis.
Emma Jackson and Lucy Hart, members of the Coventry team, did a talk for teachers at SFX last summer as part of our QIA Beacon Colleges workshops and their earlier research can be seen in this Powerpoint on the resources site, while this most recent research is available as a pdf here.
This is all good stuff for ENGA3 Language Discourses (A2 students) but equally it's excellent material for Language & Mode ENGA1, especially the material here on the British Academy's news release about the research.
Shortenings: cutting the end off a word, losing more than one letter, e.g. bro = brother.
Contractions: cutting letters, usually vowels, out of the middle of a word, e.g. txt, plz, hmwrk.
G Clippings: cutting off only the final g in a word, e.g. goin, comin, workin, swimmin.
Other Clippings: cutting off other final letters, e.g. I’v, hav, wil, com.
Symbols: using symbols, including emoticons, and x used symbolically, e.g. &, @, ;-), :-p, xxx.
Initialisms: a word or group of words is represented by its initial letter, e.g. tb = text back, lol = laughing out loud, gf = girlfriend.
Letter/Number Homophones: a letter or number is used to take the place of a phoneme, syllable, or word of the same sound, e.g. 4, 2, l8r, u, r, c.
Non-conventional Spellings: a word is spelled according to legitimate English phoneme-grapheme conversion rules, but not the conventional one used to spell the word, e.g. nite, cum, fone, skool.
Accent Stylisation: a word is spelled as it is pronounced in casual speech, e.g. gonna, wiv = with, av = have, wanna, elp = help, anuva = another.
Missing Apostrophes: left out either in possessive or traditional contraction form, e.g. dads, Im, Ive, cant.
According to an article in last week's Times, texting is not only making teens' vocabulary shrink to an almost caveman-like 800 words a day but it's also making them unemployable. The article quotes research commissioned by the government which states that teenagers "are avoiding using a broad vocabulary and complex words in favour of the abbreviated “teenspeak” of text messages, social networking sites and internet chat rooms". So, it's not just texting then , but all computer-mediated communication that's to blame.
It's another moral panic which stokes the public's fears about a new generation of illiterate imbeciles being spawned by feckless parents and incompetent teachers. And do u no wot? It's rubbish. But at least it's exactly the kind of article you can use in preparation for the Language Discourses part of ENGA3 and this article even manages to quote a proper linguist, the ubiquitous (look it up and improve your meagre vocabulary if you don't know what this word means) David Crystal:
David Crystal, honorary professor of linguistics at Bangor University in Wales, said many experts underestimate the breadth and complexity of a teenager’s vocabulary. “The real issue here is that people object to kids having a good vocabulary for hip-hop and not for politics. They have an articulate vocabulary for the kind of things they want to talk about,” he said. “Few academics get anywhere near measuring that vocabulary.”
Go David, go David. We're gonna party, like it's your birthday. Etc.
An encouraging aspect of an otherwise scaremongering article is the mention of the government 's Communication Czar, Jean Gross, and her plan to get teenagers to record language being used in workplaces and for them to study what they record. Sounds to me like what we've been doing very successfully for the last 10 years with English Language A level...
Edited on 23rd Jan to add: David Crystal has a very good post on this on his own blog here.
