Phone texting 'helps pupils to spell'

[KittyNotVengefulAnymore]

Err, really?

Yeah, course it does.
It helps them to spell incorrect facile crap.

It doesn't suprise me too much. Enjoying playing with words didn't start with txtspk -the 'riddle' 2YY UR, 2YY UB, ICUR2YY4 Me is as old as the hills. Its not a million miles from cryptic crossword clues - throwing words around in your head is good mental exercise.

Perhaps they should be directed to the thread on the Facebook cigarette baby. Take a look at the way the mother writes - that is what text speak does.

And one would like to think that not all those medievals scholars using heavily abbreviated writing ended up hopelessly illiterate.

Just because a child uses text speak doesn't mean they can't spell in proper writing.

Like Grimma says word play and playing with letters has been around for years.

Text speak is a new form of shorthand in many ways, simple as that.

I can spell but on MN will still use dh, dd, lol, imo, etc.

Text speak started because text messages were a limited set of characters. This has changed a little and increased, although they are still restricted, and if you go over xx characters it costs you another text message to finish your sentence. So it is shorthand to make messaging cheaper. It was also used initially before predicitive text came in, to quicken messaging up.

I chose not to use text speak on my mobile. I have predictive text and text speak would be more of a pain anyway. And I prefer to use punctuation.

But I have known a lot of teenagers use text speak and still be perfectly capable of writing and spelling properly on paper. I have never seen homework or exam answers using text speak for example.

I do think there is a time and place for not using text speak, but I don't see it as a problem. I think some people have a ridiculous level of snobbery over it.

It's funny that text speak is seen as such a corrupting influence, while learning palaeography (=old text speak) is seen as a very advanced academic thing to do.

On R4 this morning it was pointed out that doing a lot of texting (to the exclusion of reading books etc) was a negative. So, txtspk itself isn't a problem, its if that's all you do.

I think text speak is awful. I'm a regular user of facebook and half of what is written in peoples status's is a mystery to me and I have been texting for 10yrs plus. Good old fashion words are the best method of communication. At least that way I dont have to look up a text dictionary to read something!!!

I dont think though that texting is completely to blame for mis spellings. Everyone is taught to use computers now a days and everything is predictive and shortened. Technology advancement allows us more access to the worlds around us but yet makes us slighter more denser in doing so.

This article is absolutely correct. You have to know how a word is spelt in the first place in order to be able to turn it into txtspeak and retain its meaning.

I attended a talk recently by David Crystal, who is a very well known prof of linguistics and he agreed and if anyone should know it's him A fabulous man.

Txtspeak is purely the next 'evolutionary' stage of language (English in particular), like it or not. The Anglo Saxons hated it when bits of Norman French and Viking crept into the language, and this same process of constant modification has been going on ever since

It's actually one of the things that makes English one of the world's most marvellous, enduring and popular languages - its flexibility. Some languages (like Japanese) find it so difficult to 'create' new words that they just use the English ones.

Txtspeak will gradually creep into common parlance because so many people are using it - like our grandparents before us when 'Americanisms' crept in, many of us will probably hate the concept but perhaps we should celebrate it as part of the evolution of a language?

are you kidding?? Not yet read the article but my step sister now says riily instead of really

That's not txt speak as defined in the article, that's just bad spelling.

'the use of texting is driving children's phonological awareness'?

Please please please, let me get what I want. Decent research.

David. He's the man.

u do not hav to be a skl pupl 2C dat dis is a load of crp.

or 2B even

lol @ forgetting 2B. You dimwit.

It just shows I don't naturally lapse into that idiom.

It just shows you are not 14

plus, you can say "dnt" to mean do not.
(and even standard english allows contractions, so it could have been "don't" even without textspeak)

u dnt hv 2B a sklpupl 2C ds lod a crp