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Text messaging is now the world’s most popular form of communication (overtaking emails and even face-to-face conversation), with 5 trillion SMS messages sent worldwide in 2009. In addition to this, more than 65 million Twitter messages (or tweets) are sent daily, along with 4 billion messages on Facebook. Because users are limited to messages of only 140 characters in length for Twitter and 160 characters for a text message, a whole new way of writing has emerged – which involves foregoing punctuation and contracting words or using acronyms to save space. For example, common contractions include: ‘great’ becoming ‘g8’, ‘you’ becoming ‘u’, ‘the’ becoming ‘da’, ‘because’ becoming ‘cuz’, ‘talk to you later’ becoming ‘TTYL’ and ‘laugh out loud’ being written as ‘LOL’ (though some older users use ‘LOL’ to denote ‘Lots of Love’). These contractions are at the heart of the concern about declining literacy.

Shanahan points to the more than 30 billion e-mail messages and 5 billion text messages that are exchanged every day as evidence of how technology “is raising the value of reading in our society, both as an economic and as a social activity.”

“I think it makes sense for these social conversations to be lightweight or light-hearted in terms of the syntax,” said President of Dictionary.com Shravan Goli. “But ultimately, in the world of business and in the world they will live in, in terms of their jobs and professional lives, students will need good, solid reading and writing skills. I’m a little worried about where we are in America with literacy levels dropping. Are these [electronic devices] helping us, or making it worse? I think they may be going the other way and making it worse.”

Digital natives, people born after 1980, have grown up with new technology and are using it every day, multiple times a day. This research will uncover why this new technology, text messaging in particular, is affecting students’ learning. Texting like any form of writing takes time, and on a small keyboard like a cellular device, it can take even longer. Over the years, “texters” have saved time by creating a new form of shorthand often called “chat-speak”. This form of writing uses abbreviations that includes numbers, symbols and, incorrect grammar. Students who text every day have gotten so used to this form of writing that they are starting to use it for school related projects and real world scenarios, such as job applications.

"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.

At Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, one in 10 new students are not qualified to take the mandatory writing courses required for graduation. That 10 per cent must take so-called "foundational" writing courses first.