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Children's Text Messaging and Traditional Literacy

Children's Text Messaging and Traditional Literacy

Beverly Plester, Clare Wood, Samantha Bowyer
Copyright: © 2009 |Pages: 13
ISBN13: 9781605661209|ISBN10: 1605661201|EISBN13: 9781605661216
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-120-9.ch032
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MLA

Plester, Beverly, et al. "Children's Text Messaging and Traditional Literacy." Handbook of Research on New Media Literacy at the K-12 Level: Issues and Challenges, edited by Leo Tan Wee Hin and R. Subramaniam, IGI Global, 2009, pp. 492-504. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-60566-120-9.ch032

APA

Plester, B., Wood, C., & Bowyer, S. (2009). Children's Text Messaging and Traditional Literacy. In L. Tan Wee Hin & R. Subramaniam (Eds.), Handbook of Research on New Media Literacy at the K-12 Level: Issues and Challenges (pp. 492-504). IGI Global. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-60566-120-9.ch032

Chicago

Plester, Beverly, Clare Wood, and Samantha Bowyer. "Children's Text Messaging and Traditional Literacy." In Handbook of Research on New Media Literacy at the K-12 Level: Issues and Challenges, edited by Leo Tan Wee Hin and R. Subramaniam, 492-504. Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 2009. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-60566-120-9.ch032

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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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