DURBAN:021210 Growing road hazard… people texting and driving. Picture: GCINA NDWALANE PICTURE:GCINA NDWALANE

Washington - If you think that young people seem to be spending more of their time “face-to-screen” than “face-to-face,” you're probably right. And a lot of that screen time seems to involve reading or writing English that duznt look quite lyk it shld.

It's not surprising that many teachers, parents, and young people themselves feel concerned about this constant exposure to non-standard written English. It seems quite plausible that frequently seeing to/too written as 2, or people written as ppl, might mean that these kinds of spellings could start to creep into students' formal writing.

Fortunately, in recent years, the research has returned a fairly robust conclusion. Rather than spoiling children's spelling, exposure to “textisms” (the abbreviated spellings of text messages) is actually associated with better literacy skills. For adults, there seem to be few consistent relationships between usage of textisms and spelling skill.

However, there has been less research on textisms that represent not the re-spelling of individual words but violations of grammatical conventions. capitals get ignored, theres no apostrophes in sight, and sentences get separated not by standard punctuation marks, but by ironical laughter lol or expressions of emotion

If it's OK to write im coming sarah!!! when texting, how will younger children learn, or older children remember, to use the conventions of grammatical English writing?


The Conversation

At our first time point, these young people provided us with copies of all the text messages that they'd sent in the last two days. We analysed these messages for their violations of standard English grammar. The three most common types of violation were:

— omission of capitalisation and punctuation (hi how are you)


— unconventional punctuation (using multiple punctuation marks (??!!!), or emoticons , kisses (xxx) and initialisms (lol) in place of normal punctuation)

Less common but also present were word-level grammatical violations, including apparently deliberate violations such as is you and does they, and word reductions such as hafta, tryna for have to, trying to.


Overall, we found no evidence that the use of grammatical violations in text messages is consistently related to poorer grammatical or spelling skills in school students. Although omitting capitals and punctuation was associated with poorer later spelling in primary school, the other significant relationships were positive. Primary and high school students' use of ungrammatical word forms (eg, does you), and high school students' omission of capitals and punctuation, and use of word reductions (eg, gonna) were all associated with better or faster spelling development.


These results tie in with most previous work on literacy skills and text messaging. In their school years, students are consolidating their knowledge of written language. “Playing around” with language in the informal setting of texting provides the chance to practice alternative ways of linking sounds and letters (“Hey, I could write thanks as thanx!”), an ability which is well known to underlie strong reading and spelling skills.



* This article was originally published on The Conversation: