Texting has become a popular activity for teenagers throughout their daily lives. It has become the norm to receive a cell phone once you are a teenager, and the age when kids are given cell phones gets younger and younger as times goes by. Adolescents use their cell phones for a lot more than just making phone calls though; they now communicate via text message. Texting has become one of ways to join the in-crowd, and most of the youths who text often let their cell phones control their lives just as society controls them in pressuring them to text their friends.
Texting has become a new form of communication for adolescents. It is simpler for many to type out abbreviated words and shorthand in order to tell someone a message than to call them up because they don’t have to go through the routine of starting and ending the conversation. However, this evolution of communication is starting to affect more than just the mode in which messages are transferred. Texting has become so popular that it is beginning to show up in schoolwork all over. Some people believe that this is harming the English language, but others find it to be just a change of the times as the English language is constantly evolving. No matter the stance taken on this issue though, it can be agreed upon that text lingo is beginning to affect the English language in classrooms all over.
The majority of those people who believe that texting is ruining the English language are educators who have grown tired of getting out their red pens to mark every word in an essay that isn’t actually in the English language. Teachers in Charleston, West Virginia are concerned that textual language, and other electronic languages, will soon take over regular English writing, especially when it comes to cursive. Cheryl Jeffers, an education professor at Marshall University says of the situation, “Text messaging, e-mail, and word processing have replaced handwriting outside the classroom”, and she worries that handwriting will continue to be misplaced as the years go by (Breen). Others see that this could just be some of the same old hysteria that has been heard before. Kathleen Wright works for an education materials company named Zaner-Bloser where she is the national product manager for handwriting. She believes that the text message craze is similar to the time in which typewriters first came out because people said the same things about them. They believed the typewriters would change how people communicated permanently, but in the end the English language didn’t change that much (Breen).
Still, there are those people that bring up the debate that texting is making it hard for teachers to understand the students’ language in their work, and this in turn is affecting the grammar and spelling of the students’ language. A study by the United Kingdom’s Telegraph showed that 4 out of 10 teachers couldn’t understand their students’ work because of the lingo, and 55 percent of a group of 500 surveyed teachers said that they could see that their students’ grammar was getting worse due to all the text lingo that was used (Paton). This follows some of the same steps that author and educator, Paul Jury has come up with when it comes to this topic.
Jury came up with five steps to decide whether texting is ruining or changing our language. He says that new words are being created, an extra space has been deleted after sentences, hyphens are vanishing from between words, students are learning to be more concise, and there are errors in spelling, reading, and writing (Jury). Some of these steps happen to fall into the side that texting is ruining our language, but others show how the language is changing for the better. When it comes to ruining the language, Jury sees the elimination of a space after sentences and the disappearance of hyphens as a knock at the language that once was. He says it’s not that big of a deal, but he always learned that there were to be two spaces after a sentence. Now that texting has caused people to write quickly with a limited number of characters this rule has gone by the wayside (Jury). When it comes to the hyphen issue he says, “Nearly 16,000 thousand words have been stripped of their hyphens in recent dictionary versions: leap-frog has become leapfrog, make-over has become makeover, and post-modern has become postmodern, all because people are too lazy to reach for that one extra key” (Jury). He worries that this is going to change the historical significance of the English language into a language similar to Swedish as longer words are put together (Jury).
He also has issues with spelling and grammar, but they can be borderline on the language ruined/language changing debate. He states, “I will still say I think texting does have a slightly negative effect, on spelling at least (if for no other reason than the nonincentive it provides to practice spelling words correctly, especially advanced words). And some words get spelled wrong so often (tonite/tonight) in texting that students really are starting to lose track of which way is correct” (Jury). Jury believes that just because an adolescent spells a word in a shortened version with textual language, it doesn’t mean that he couldn’t spell the word if he had too. However, he also believes that since the shortening of words is happening so much it is quite possible that over time the students forget how to spell the words correctly because they have been so used to shortening them. A study by the British Academy would disagree with this point as they found that “more sophisticated literacy skills are needed for textism use” (Turnbull). Therefore, the students have to know how to spell and read the word in order to know how to shorten it for texting. When it comes to grammar, Jury believes that students are either going to be do well with grammar or poorly depending on what they have learned; he doesn’t think cell phone texting affects that at all (Jury).
Jury believes that the language is forever changing though when it comes to new words and brevity. He compares the text lingo of LOL and OMG to that of all the new words that Shakespeare and Webster brought into the English language. He says, “New technology spawns new words, just like all new culture does. But to argue that this is a bad thing is to deny the very flexibility that makes language useful” (Jury). Therefore, he is arguing in the simplest matter that any type of new word added to a language can be useful because it adds to the diversity of the language and the options speakers have to choose various words. One of Britain’s leading linguists, David Crystal, would agree with Jury on this point. He says, “Shakespeare freely used elisions, novel syntax and several thousand made-up words (his own name was signed in six different ways). Even some common conventions are relatively newfangled: rules for using the oft-abused apostrophe were set only in the middle of the 19th century. The point is that tailored text predates the text message, so we might as well accept that ours is a language of vandals” (Huang). Crystal is saying that language has always been changed by the people using it, so we should just accept it as a commonplace occurrence. He believes that all change in language is gradual, but in the end there will be a monumental development to how we speak and communicate(Huang).
When it comes to brevity Jury describes how many of the text messaging programs only allow a certain number of characters in their boxes as a limit, so students are learning to become more concise when it comes to writing essays because they are used to having to cut words out to fill a small space (Jury). Many scholars in the field would agree with him on this, as more and more people are beginning to take the side of the evolving language in this debate.
Many people now see that texting is actually helping students better understand the English language. This may be surprising to some, but different research has shown that language learners are better at spelling, grammar, and learning the language when they are also chronic texters. The British Academy in the United Kingdom found that in doing research with kids age eight to twelve, texting helps them a lot with, “phonological awareness…a child’s ability to detect, isolate and manipulate patterns of sound in speech” (Tumbull). Basically, this argues for the fact, against Jury’s belief, that texting helps learners get down to the root of the language. Since the language is short and concise and the students are around it all the time, they have the extra time to work with it, and this in turn helps them out with their language skills in general. This is also illustrated in Newsweek writer Lily Huang’ article titled The Death of English (LOL). In this article she talks about a new book by David Crystal titled Txtng: the Gr8 Db8. The book looks at how texting is making people better communicators because they are able to go to the root of the language. Huang says, “Far from being a means to getting around literacy, texting seems to give literacy a boost. The effect is similar to what happens when parents yak away to infants or read to toddlers: the more exposure children get to language, by whatever means, the more verbally skilled they become” (Huang). Therefore, she sides with Crystal in believing that texting actually helps students better understand the language because some exposure to it through texting is better than no exposure at all. Crystal also believes that the effects that others have seen in their classrooms due to the high amount of students who text is only just a minor change in the English language. Crystal uses examples from the past to show that language it forever changing. He states that more of the language was changed due to British influence during the Revolutionary War and other times in history than what is occurring now with texting (Huang).
Crystal believes that the language is always going to change and over time new additions will keep being added to it. Although many other people have debated that the text lingo that shows up in papers is harming the way their students’ write and use the language, all and all Crystal sees that any use of the language can be beneficial for the students in the long run.
When looking at this topic, it seems to be that people are all over the board when it comes to opinions. Many believe that the textual language that shows up in papers is a hindrance on the language because they see how their students can’t even write a basic essay without using abbreviations of words. However, others take the middle ground and are able to see that certain aspects of the texting lifestyle can impede the use of proper English, but they can also appreciate the fact that this new form of communication is adding so many interesting pieces to the English language. Moreover, others believe the latter part of this in full because they see the diversity brought to the English language from text lingo and are able to appreciate that this form of communicating is helping language learners at spelling and grammar because they’re able to get down to the root of the word. All in all, this debate on whether text lingo in classrooms is ruining the English language or helping it evolve is never going to stop. It really is a matter of opinion, but when one stops to think about all the students concentrating on texting their friends and then putting those similar shortened words into essays for a grade, it is easy to see that texting definitely has affected the way the English language is used in the school system, whether that be for bad or for good.
Works Cited
- Breen, Tom. “Cursive May be a Fading Skill, but so What?” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. 19 September 2009. Web. 9 November 2010
- Huang, Lily. “The Death of English (LOL).” Newsweek. 8 August 2008. Web. 9 November 2010.
- Jury, Paul. “5 Ways Texting Is Ruining Changing English.” The Huffington Post. 23 July 2010. Web. 9 November 2010.
- Paton, Grame. “Text Message Slang Found in School Work.” The Telegraph. 12 December 2008. Web. 9 November 2010.
- Turnbull, Kaite. “LITER8 LRNRS: Is Texting Valuable or Vandalism?” British Academy. 2009. Web. 9 November 2010.
