The long-held belief that television is detrimental to child development, emotional health and overall literacy has been a stubborn one in North America. The opinion, largely fuelled by anecdotal evidence, and poorly constructed studies has, however, proven not only unfounded, but the bulk of research has actually demonstrated the opposite.

"Moderate amounts of television viewing were found to be beneficial for reading," states Annie Moses in the Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, further stating that "programs that aim to promote literacy in young children have been found to positively impact specific early literacy skills"

The key, of course, is age-appropriate programs and moderate amounts of viewing -- when young children watch excessive amounts of television (more than three to four hours a day), or adult-oriented or violent programs, the same studies reviewed by Moses showed definite negative effects on learning, aggressiveness, and literacy.

According to a recent survey of around 3,000 kids, those who text, blog and use social sites such as Facebook have better writing skills than their less technologically inclined counterparts. This hardly comes as a surprise to us tech geeks who spent our younger days alternating between writing critical theses on esoteric forums and getting…

When researchers asked the children to rate their writing skills, 47 percent of those who were non-bloggers and didn't use social networking sites said that their writing skills were good. The online set projected higher levels of confidence; of those who maintained blogs, 61 percent said their writing was good or very good.

He continued to say that online engagement can lead to offline creativity, such as story writing and song composition.

Back in 2003, Dr. Crispin Thurlow, an expert in language and communication, described the language of text messaging to be ‘adaptive and additive rather than necessarily subtractive,’ meaning that texting can have positive linguistic advantages. However, Thurlow’s remarks were made almost a decade ago and research highlights substantial increases in young people’s use of computer-mediated communication (CMC)  and shows that text messaging is one of the most widespread digital practices.  A 2010 study clearly supports this by revealing that US teens alone send over 6 text messages per waking hour, and send and receive and average of 3,339 texts monthly.

Interested in texting, and its affects on literary skills, Clare Wood, Sally Meachem, and their research team investigated text messaging and spelling ability in children aged 8-12 years in 2011. The team concluded from the results of their study that the use of ‘textisms,’ or text-message spellings, does affect spelling performance, but when strong phonological skills are present, spelling skills remain intact.

In 2009, Beverly Plester and Clare Wood, taking interest in the question of the influence of texting on literacy, focused on the use of text messaging by pre-teen British children. In this study, the researchers paid specific attention to the abbreviations and characteristic language used within text messages, also known as ‘textese’ and ‘textisms.’ Their results did not conclusively support the negative reports surrounding cell phone use and texting. Quite the reverse, they discovered that textese and textisms assisted the development of literary skills