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Welcome to our first blog. What a great way to communicate!  According to Lorelle Van Fossen, author of Blogging Tips “a blog gives information and makes room for conversation”.  I therefore plan to share with you on a fortnightly basis. Please feel free to comment.

SMS language is not ruining children’s spelling abilities
I was relieved to read in the Cape Argus the other day that a study from the University of Alberta revealed that the abbreviated and unpunctuated language used in instant messaging and SMSing has probably no effect on children’s spelling abilities. The language variations commonly used in SMSes should be viewed as a new language or at least a dialect with its own set of rules for spelling and writing.

In the study 40 participants were asked to save their SMSes for a week. At the end of the week, they wrote a standardised spelling test. The researchers were pleasantly surprised that the students knew that there are “correct” ways of spelling in “chat-speak”, e.g.:

“want to” becomes “wanna”; never “wanta”
“should’ve” becomes “shoulda”; never “shuda”
“probably” becomes “prolly”; never “proly”.

The study suggests that we need not worry that kids who use chat-speak will become bad spellers or never learn how to write well because young people can compartmentalise their language. They have language that they use among friends and language that they speak in classrooms.

Naughty?

Everybody who uses predictive text on their cellphones knows that the key presses for certain words are the same, e.g. “ocean” and “madam”. So be careful what you type if you want to send an SMS to check if a friend, ill with the flu, is tucked up safe with a dose of MedLemon.  An innocent enquiry, “Are you home in bed?” can turn into a rather embarrassing “Are you good in bed?”

This modern phenomenon already has a name – it’s a “textonym”. These are making such an impact that children are now saying “that’s so book” instead of “that’s so cool”! (Adapted from Daily Mail)

Suggestions for class activities

1. Let students use the following words in clear sentences to illustrate the meaning. They may work in pairs.
participants, chat-speak, predictive, textonym.

2. Students must pretend they’re at a live soccer match, watching their favourite team. Let them draft an SMS to a friend where they are (1) pleased (2) disgusted with their team’s performance. Both SMSes must be in standard language and chat-speak. (Refer to NCV 2 Language Hands-On Training p.97).

3. Perhaps you want to teach or revise other “-nyms”, e.g. acronym, homonym, synonym, antonym. (Refer to NCV 4 Language Hands-On Training pp.51, 197, 198)

By the way…
Blog comes from web log.
Happy teaching!

Author: Frieda Wade

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