Computers & Education

As previous researches of text messaging and literacy more focused on whether spelling/representation violates individual words in text and such violations’ connection with conventional grammatical errors(p.289). However, in this study, Clare Wood, Nenagh Kemp, Sam Waldron and Lucy Hart(2014) take more efforts to find participants’ grammatical mistake in their text messaging and their performance on spoken and written grammatical understanding, orthographic processing and conventional spelling ability evaluations (p.281).

Methods in this study are divided into 3 parts. First, they choose three groups of students from three primary schools, three secondary schools and a university and measured their age range and IQ. Second, all the participants were asked to finish Test of Receptive Grammar II, “a widely used and validated, standardized assessment of children’s and adults’ understanding of spoken grammar”(p.284). Last, researchers analyzed and coded participants’ recent two-day sending messages. Observing their grammatical violations (p.285).

In conclusion, Clare Wood, Nenagh Kemp, Sam Waldron and Lucy Hart(2014) find out that “these grammatical transgressions represented a mix of playful, deliberate textisms that happened to violate conventional grammar, and instances of careless or ignorant grammatical errors”(p.289). and the trend of not following conventional grammatical rules in messages for children was not actually influenced their reading, spelling or grammatical skills(p.289). In the other word, grammatical violations have no apparent and direct relation with grammatical knowledge decline. Therefore, the previous idea of negative impact of texting on language skills may be overstated (p.289).

For me,this study has a broaden view of relationship between text messaging and literacy and it clarifies the innocence of text messaging with strong evidence. Furthermore, it gives out a future exploring direction for research of this topic that “whether different patterns are seen with adults of a broader range of ages, whose literacy skills may be less well consolidated to begin with” (p.289). In my topic research, I can apply this study as a positive evidence of text messaging with literacy and follow the guide of this study to make a further research.

Wood, C., Kemp, N., Waldron, S., & Hart, L. (2014). Grammatical understanding, literacy and text messaging in school children and undergraduate students: A concurrent analysis. Computers & Education, 70, 281-290. doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2013.09.003