GR8 news. Text message “shorthand” may help youngsters to improve their literary skills. Far from eroding children’s language, as widely feared, texting can increase children’s phonetic awareness and linguistic creativity, research suggests.

A study of the spelling and punctuation of 11-year-olds who regularly use mobile text messaging found no difference between their attainment and the average achievement levels of non-texting pupils of the same age and educational level.

Bev Plester, who conducted the study, said that there appeared to be a strong positive relationship between children’s attainment in standard English and the sophistication of their texting. “There is no evidence to link text messaging among children to a poorer ability in standard English and those children who were the best at using textisms were also found to be the better spellers and writers,” she told the British Psychological Society in London yesterday.

Publication of the research comes amid growing concern about the effect of new technologies on children’s ability to communicate.

An estimated nine million children in the UK under the age of 15 own mobile phones, and growth in the market is being driven by the under-10s. The average age for children to be given their first mobile phone has fallen to 8, and a million youngsters between the ages of 5 and 9 now own one.

Mobile phone use is now so much a part of youth culture that it has been incorporated into some educational material, with summaries of classics such as Shakespeare plays sent to pupils’ mobiles in text format.

Fears that texting might be harming language development arose after examination boards and teachers noticed a growing number of textisms in children’s schoolwork and exam scripts. But Ms Plester’s research suggests that this is not necessarily a bad thing.

Ms Plester, a psychologist at Coventry University, and her colleague Clare Wood, invited 35 children aged 11 who used mobile phones to complete a questionnaire about their mobile phone use. They were asked to translate messages between standard English and text language, as well as to complete tasks to reveal their English, writing, reading and spelling abilities.

The results showed that the children were far more likely to use their mobile phones for texting than for talking. Most text abbreviations were phonetically based, such as “wot” for “what” and rebus — or puzzle — types, such as “C U L8r”.

Many of the children also used “youth code” or casual language such as “dat fing”, “gonna” or “wanna”. The most commonly used acronym was “wuu2”, for “what are you up to?” The children who were best at spelling used the most textisms.

Ms Plester said that the children had developed a highly sophisticated command of different linguistic registers. “They know when to use standard English and when to use textisms or genteel gangster speech, such as ‘dat fing’. If they allow text language to enter their school or exam work, it is probably because they are doing it on purpose to make a point, such as demonstrating a lack of respect . . . It is not because they do not know how to spell or write.”

What are you doing tonight? Can you come out to the cinema? Wot u doin 2nit Cn U cm 2 cnma

I cannot come out. I have too much homework to do. Cnt cm out 2 mch hmwk

Text translation tests of the kind used by Bev Plester and Clare Wood

SIGN LANGUAGE

The text phenomenon is a case of “the medium is the message”, where human behaviour has been shaped by a neutral tool

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