So here’s the tea about texting and literacy skills. Did you know that there’s a whole debate over whether texting depletes children’s literacy skills? I’ve had the pleasure to get into a couple of people minds about the ‘issue’ at hand. There has even been a number of small studies that has said the complete opposite. Texting doesn’t ruin literacy skills, instead it enhances them.
Since the beginning of time “new technologies have consistently threatened old ones, so cries that “texting is killing civilization” are part of a big history trashing new media (Justice 312). Because texting is new, it is getting trashed just like writing, video games, television, etc. did. When something new is introduced, you have to accommodate to it, don’t just shame it because it’s unfamiliar to you. Christopher says that, “several researchers have found positive correlations between texting and people’s literacy skills” (311). For example, Kat Fox found that texting improved texters summarizing skills, or the group of researchers at Coventry University whom discovered that the more pre-teen children used text abbreviations, the more likely they were to score higher on reading and vocabulary tests, vice versa. If texting really does ruin literacy skills, why are there studies showing otherwise or the that fact that the literacy rate hasn’t plummeted since texting has been introduced? “We should consider texting as not replacing formal writing, but instead, as a complex compliment to formal writing that allows people to augment their existing writing skills in fresh, complex ways. Instead of perceiving texting as a threat to literacy, we should start understanding texting as an ally” (Justice 313). If we keep seeing texting as a threat, we’re going to treat it like one, when really texting should be a partner. There was once a time when writing itself was viewed down upon by philosopher Plato. If society can get over the problematic ‘writing’ itself, whose to say we can’t do the same thing with texting.
Crystal says,” I do not see how texting could be a significant factor when discussing children who have real problems with literacy. If you have difficulty with reading and writing, you are hardly going to be predisposed to use technology which demand sophisticated abilities in reading and writing. And if you do start to text, I would expect the additional experience of writing to be help, rather than a hinderance” (157). If you actually think about it, would an illiterate person text or even attempt to, would you if you were illiterate? I know that I don’t like to try new things without having some background knowledge or information on it. Texting requires you to have some amount of background knowledge. “Before you can write abbreviated forms efficiently and play with them, you need to have a sense of how the sounds of your language relate to the letters. You need to know that there are such things as alternative spellings. You need to have a good visual memory and good motor skills. If you are aware that your texting behavior is different, you must have already intuited that there is such a thing as a standard” (Crystal 162). Texting involves much more than just pressing buttons, it involves a lot of thinking. You would have to have knowledge about mnemonics devices, code-switching, which you would do subconsciously. Texting has more than one factor that comes into play. Texting allows texters ample time to think of a reply, they could edit and revise which you wouldn’t be able to do in person. Texting includes aspects of both writing and speech, some may even call it “fingered speech” (Justice 312).
In a study of whether texting and knowledge of text abbreviations adversely affect children’s literacy attainment, “there was no evidence that knowledge of textisms by ore-teen children has any negative association with their written language competence. All associations between text language measures and school related literacy measures have either been positive or non- significant, but the relationship even in those pairing that did not reach significance were in the direction if a positive relationship between texting and school writing outcomes “(Plester etc al 142). Most studies that involve literacy and texting, more than likely has positive/good answers. If the research conclusions have been good, why all the hostility still? There were two studies conducted, the first study showed that there “was a significant association between spelling ability and the number of interpretation errors made in the textism to English translation, indicating that as the children’s spelling score increased, so the number of interpretation errors made decreased” ( Plester etc al 141). The second study showed “clearly that pre- teen children can use meta-linguistic awareness to slip between one register of language and another, as they deem appropriate” (Plester etc al 143). Meaning that the pre-teen children knew when and how to talk or text a certain depending on who they were talking too.
What’s your take on the issue? Do you believe that texting has improved of hindered your literacy skills? Personally, I believe that texting has helped my literacy skills. I know for a fact that it has helped some people with their’ s, I witnessed that first hand. If you didn’t know how to spell a word back in the days you were out of luck, but now if you speak into the phone it can spell it for you, if you pronounce it correctly, eventually you will learn how to spell the word.
Works Cited
Justice, Christopher. Texting ruins literacy skills. Digital Publishing Institute. pp 308- 314. https://textbooks.lib.wvu.edu/badideas/badideasaboutwriting-book.pdf
Crystal, David. Txtng : The Gr8 Db8.Oxford University Press, 2008. https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.ezproxy.gsu.edu/lib/gsu/reader.action?docID=829458
Beverly Plester, Clare Wood, and Victoria Bell, ‘Txt msg n school literacy: does mobile phone use adversely affect children’s literacy attainment?’. Volume 42 Number 3. Beverly Plester,2008. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/b939/c12b444eb12a6c62eb28f4baae551f4056f7.pdf