I agree that chatspeak is reducing the use of the language. I know one teenager that sends over a thousand texts per month, so a large portion of her human correspondence is done in chatspeak. Howard points out that, “whatever we engage in for a long period of time will most likely become commonplace (Howard & Monfils, 2007).” I think the harm can be countered with education, but many of these kids think they’re using real words when they’re not. They need to be aware which words are proper and which ones an adult may not even know. Effective communication has to be understood, so correspondence to non-texting people has to be filtered for these kids.
Some questions I have involve data on this problem. I’d like to know if poor writing skills and frequency of texting are related. I’d also like to know if these kids that struggle in writing are using chatspeak without knowing it, or are they just exhibiting the fact that they don’t communicate well.
Bibliography
Howard, L., & Monfils, G. (2007). Is Chatspeak Destroying English? Learning and Leading with Technology .
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
The relationship between chatspeak and poor writing skills definitely needs to be addressed. It seems that kids have phones at such a young age these days that I wonder if texting could prevent them from learning the proper spellings of words. Either way, I hope that there will be no chatspeak in my class!
ReplyDelete