How is Text messaging affecting teen literacy

By: Ashely Frame

What is texting? Text messaging can affect a person’s social skills, writing

skills, driving skills. The money that people spend on phones and texting can cause financial hardship. Text messaging has begun to have a awful effect on people’s writing skills. Texting uses inventive spelling and abbreviations. As most teenagers get used to short texting, some of their grades dropped to the spelling errors they make. So many teens get used to writing in abbreviation that they write that way daily. Teenager’s writing skills have turned into short sentence because of he limited characters used to text one another.

Teachers outlook

A new study called the Pew study, which included teens from around the United States ages 12 through 17, said 75 percent of teens with cell phones have texted in class. Text Plus recently released results of its own survey of 1,214 teens that use its service, 43 percent of which have texted in class. Is your teen texting in class? Teens seem to pay more attention to their phone than what the teacher are teaching. They seem to enjoy having the phones that will spell the words out for them so they don’t have to worry about spelling grammars. So when they are at school they really don’t know how to spell. Text messaging is a method that is adapted to teenager’s social skills.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126117811 – percentages

Who’s to blame Research and studies have been conducted to further

understand the texting-literacy relationship. Parents and teachers often blame texting for the corruption of language and degradation in spelling. Teachers are complaining about texting they are finding in students’ schoolwork. They wonder if texting can have any positive influence on learners’ language development. Many studies have found that teens through their texting, blogging, and emailing are reading and writing more than any other generation. Most research seems to focus on the relationship between texting use and phonological awareness.

Texting percentage Teens obviously hold the crown for the most chronic

texters. According to a study performed by Nielsen, teens ages 13-17are now averaging roughly 3,417 text messages per month. Young adults ages 18-24 come in second at an average of 1,914 text messages per month.

The chart drops off from there: 25-34 year-olds exchange 928 texts on average, 35-44 year-olds exchange 709, 45-54 year-olds exchange 434, 55-64 year-olds exchange 167 and 65 year-olds and up exchange a whopping 64 texts per month on average.

http://www.phonedog.com/

Survey time !!

Daphney(14): yes our literacy is affected Taylor(16): no our literacy is fine Josiah(18): no our literacy is fine Duane(15): yes our literacy is affected Josh(18): no our literacy is fine Ally(15): yes our literacy is affected Daniel(19): yes our literacy is affected

So 75 percent of teens our age agree with the fact that texting affects our literacy

What do you think or believe? With all that has been said how do you

feel about the problem in teen texting . Honestly do you believe text messaging is affecting teen literacy?