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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.

Middle school students who frequently use "tech-speak"—omitting letters to shorten words and using homophone symbols, such as @ for "at" or 2nite for "tonight"—performed worse on a test of basic grammar, according to a new study in New Media & Society.

Drew P. Cingel, a doctoral candidate in media, technology, and society at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., conducted the experiment when he was an undergraduate with the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Penn State University in University Park, Pa. under director S. Shyam Sundar. The researchers surveyed 228 6th, 7th, and 8th graders in central Pennsylvania on their daily habits, including the number of texts they sent and received, their attitudes about texting, and their other activities during the day, such as watching television or reading for pleasure. The researchers then assessed the students using 22 questions adapted from a 9th-grade grammar test to include only topics taught by 6th grade, including verb/noun agreement, use of correct tense, homophones, possessives, apostrophes, comma usage, punctuation, and capitalization. Mr. Cingel, who published the study while at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., and Mr. Sundar found that the more often students sent text messages using text-speak (shortened words and homophones), the worse their grammar—a concern as 13- to 17-year-olds send more than twice the number of text messages each month than any other age group.

According to Job Bank USA, numerous employers have complained of the sheer volume of job applications they receive written in text language [1]. In particular they note that many applicants have a tendency to speak informally and use text message abbreviations, giving the impression that they are corresponding with an old friend rather than a potential employer. Such prospective applicants seem therefore poorly educated, lazy, and unprofessional. Needless to say, in most cases such applications are thrown in the bin and never thought of again.

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.

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.”

Is Texting Killing the English Language?

"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.