Txting develops spelling skills, how gr8

by | Friday, January 28, 2011

Scott Graden is Superintendent of Saline Area Schools and a blogger. He recently posted about a study that indicated that texting helps students develop vocabulary skills. Though he was skeptical of the finding, I am not sure I was as surprised. He cited a news story on ReadWriteWeb titled Research Finds Text-Messaging Improves Children’s Spelling Skills. The story says,

… a new study from Coventry University finds no evidence that having access to mobile phones harms children’s literacy skills. In fact, the research suggests that texting abbreviations or “textisms” may actually aid reading, writing and spelling skills.

The story goes on the say that

Based on a series of reading and spelling tests, researchers found a “significant contribution of textism use to the children’s spelling development during the study.” The study made it clear that it wasn’t the access to the phone per se, or even the text-messaging as much as specifically the use of textisms that aided the development. The reason, writes Dr. Clare Wood, one of the authors of the study, “is partly explained by the highly phonetic nature of the textisms that are popular within this age group, as the phonological and alphabetic awareness that is required for the construction and decoding of these textisms also underpin successful reading development.”

Scott, who is far from being a techno-phobe, was not sure if he actually bought into the findings of this study. He was surprised by it and also questioned its validity. He is not alone in espousing this point of view. As I had written earlier, in a post titled, Technology & Literacy, bemoaning the youth of today 🙂, technology is not destroying our ability to write, it just changing the way we do so. I don’t want to repeat what I had written earlier, so go there and take a look and let me know what you think?

Is Scott right? Is txt-ing destroying writing as we know it? Let me know.

Topics related to this post: Blogging | Philosophy | Representation | Teaching | Technology

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Unconscious competence, continuing the dialogue

Ken Friedman, whose article I had used as the basis of my previous posting, From incompetence to mastery, the stages dropped me an email in response to my critique. To provide some context, (you can read my full post here) I had suggested in my posting that it may be...

New course: Creativity in teaching & learning

Announcing a new online course for the fall semester 2008:Creativity in teaching and learning Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently… You can praise them, disagree...

Video Bingo in Alabama: Tech & change

How does technology change what we do? Often when a new technology appears we tend to see it in terms of existing practices and structures. So an e-book is the same as a book, except in digital format. E-books still have "pages" which we "turn" (with a flick or our...

Textbooks meet Bittorrent!

NYTimes article on how publishers are responding to the advent of peer-to-peer sharing of textbook files. Check out First It Was Song Downloads. Now It’s Organic Chemistry.

TPACK & More: Presentation at RemoteK12 summit

TPACK & More: Presentation at RemoteK12 summit

REMOTE K12: The Connected Teacher Summit, was a one-day virtual summit hosted by ASU, designed for K-12 teachers and those that support and enable teachers in district public, charter and private schools.  I presented a talk titled: Technology in teaching &...

EPET at SITE, 2014

SITE2014 (the annual conference of the Society of Information Technology in Teacher Education) is being held in Jacksonville, Florida starting the 17th of March. As always, the Educational Psychology and Educational Technology program at MSU has a significant presence...

Why I like naps

... because scientific research shows that sleep enhances creativity 🙂

Only one recipe…

I have been catching up on my reading of Slate and came across this gem of an article by Judith Shulevitz titled, The care and feeding of fiction. Shulevitz has written a quasi-review of James Wood's new book How fiction works and makes we want to read the book...

Goodbye Malaysia, welcome Taiwan

So my stay in Malaysia comes to an end. I haven’t had either had time or internet access to be able to update the blog the last few days. So briefly here goes… The day after the presentation (the 13th) I had a meeting with Professors Ramayah, Rozinah, and Bala at USM...

6 Comments

  1. SEO Writing

    Great thought. I agree with that. It is really moor informative. It helps children to improve their skill. Thanks for sharing that information.

    Reply
  2. Degree in Criminology

    Hi I might have to disagree with one comment above about having texting allowed in classrooms. This might be taking it a bit too far in my opinion. Sure texting is a great communication tool – but it also a very big distraction. That is why you are seeing lawmakers across north america looking to change driving laws and even pedestrian laws to fine people who use texting devices at the same time. A little off subject but in some cases people are actually risking their lives texting – especially behind the wheel…as for classrooms, literacy levels are already being challenged, so why throw in another distraction?

    Reply
  3. acer h233h

    If it’s texting in short form, my perspective is after sometime, people will forget the real word. Some of my friends write formal emails with the “coz”, “nvm” etc, because they’re so used to it. I personally make it a habit to type full words even in text.

    Reply
  4. Beth Rogers

    My 16 year old son writes all night long – texting, posting on Facebook and other forums. He doesn’t view this as reading and writing, just communicating. I long for the day when students are able to use these applications in the classroom – imagine the engagement and learning if we asked them to translate a passage of Romeo and Juliet into texting, Facebook posts or Twitter!

    Reply
  5. Peter

    It will probably take a couple more years and a reliable methodology to get a definitive study on texting and its effects on children today. My kids text all the time but I also make sure they don’t bring texting to school.

    Reply
  6. Mint

    Children need to be made aware of when using texting language is appropiate and when not.

    Reply

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. Tweets that mention Txting develops spelling skills, how gr8 | Punya Mishra's Web -- Topsy.com - [...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by punya, remind101. remind101 said: RT @punyamishra Txting develops spelling skills, how gr8…

Leave a Reply to Beth Rogers Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *