Children's Text Messaging and Traditional Literacy

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Author(s): Beverly Plester (Coventry University, UK), Clare Wood (Coventry University, UK)and Samantha Bowyer (Coventry University, UK)
Copyright: 2009
Pages: 13
Source title: Handbook of Research on New Media Literacy at the K-12 Level: Issues and Challenges
Source Author(s)/Editor(s): Leo Tan Wee Hin (National Institute of Education, Singapore)and R. Subramaniam (National Institute of Education, Singapore)
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-120-9.ch032

Keywords: Education / Educational Technologies / Information Science Reference / Technologies in K-12 Education

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Abstract

The authors present three investigations into pre-teen children’s text message language and measures of their standard literacy abilities. The children translated sentences, from standard English into text, and from text into standard English , and wrote text messages appropriate to a set of scenarios. They categorised text abbreviations used and calculated the proportion of abbreviations to total words. The children completed a questionnaire about their mobile phone use. Text messaging facility was positively associated with verbal reasoning, vocabulary, school achievement in English, and reading ability across the three studies. Texting provides opportunity for children to communicate in writing without the constraints of standard English, and we propose that the playful variants on words that they use in texting, and their ability to encode spoken slang graphically, show not a lack of knowledge of English, but a light hearted use of phonological and alphabetic decoding principles that also underpin standard English.

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