Group items tagged

"Studies show that reading develops imagination, induction, reflection and critical thinking, as well as vocabulary," Greenfield said. "Reading for pleasure is the key to developing these skills. Students today have more visual literacy and less print literacy. Many students do not read for pleasure and have not for decades."

Another study Greenfield analyzed found that college students who watched "CNN Headline News" with just the news anchor on screen and without the "news crawl" across the bottom of the screen remembered significantly more facts from the televised broadcast than those who watched it with the distraction of the crawling text and with additional stock market and weather information on the screen. These and other studies show that multi-tasking "prevents people from getting a deeper understanding of information," Greenfield said.

Among the 64 percent of students who say they incorporated text language in their writing, 25 percent said they did so to convey emotion and 38 percent said they have used text shortcuts such as "LOL" meaning "laugh out loud."

Billy Ray Warren, secondary curriculum director for Florence schools, said texting has definitely contributed to the decline in writing skills. And there's another issue that concerns him as well: a lack of cursive writing ability. Keyboarding, in general, whether at the computer or on a cell phone, is a definite culprit in the lack of cursive writing skills among high school students, Warren said. "Cursive writing is always going to be a needed skill," he said. "The argument by those who've done away with it say it's an art form, not needed in everyday life. I would dispute that because there are jobs such as (postal carriers) whereby people have got to be able to read cursive."

"I might use the number 2 instead of spelling out "to", or for the word "into" I might write n2," she said. "But I don't use slang terms like LOL or BTW (by the way). My mom would definitely not appreciate that."

Ontario's Waterloo University is one of the few post-secondary institutions in Canada to require the students they accept to pass an exam testing their English language skills. Almost a third of those students are failing. "Thirty per cent of students who are admitted are not able to pass at a minimum level," says Ann Barrett, managing director of the English language proficiency exam at Waterloo University. "We would certainly like it to be a lot lower." Barrett says the failure rate has jumped five percentage points in the past few years, up to 30 per cent from 25 per cent.

"There has been this general sense in the last two or three years that we are finding more students are struggling in terms of language proficiency," says Rummana Khan Hemani, the university's director of academic advising. Emoticons, truncated and butchered words such as 'cuz,' are just some of the writing horrors being handed in, say professors and administrators at Simon Fraser. "Little happy faces ... or a sad face ... little abbreviations," show up even in letters of academic appeal, says Khan Hemani. "Instead of 'because', it's 'cuz'. That's one I see fairly frequently," she says, and these are new in the past five years. Khan Hemani sends appeal submissions with emoticons in them back to students to be re-written "because a committee will immediately get their backs up when they see that kind of written style."