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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.

"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.

Barrett says the failure rate has jumped five percentage points in the past few years, up to 30 per cent from 25 per cent.

“They may use a homophone, such as gr8 for great, or an initial, like, LOL for laugh out loud,” Northwestern researcher Drew Cingel explained in a statement. Other shortcuts include dropping non-essential letters, such as changing the word “would” to “wud.”

In other words, if you send your kid a lot of texts with word adaptations, then he or she will probably imitate it,”

These adaptations could affect their offline language skills that are important to language development and grammar skills, as well.”

Report var addthis_config = {data_track_clickback: false, ui_click: true, services_compact: "reddit, linkedin, tumblr, pinterest, google_plusone_share, more", services_exclude: "facebook, twitter, print"} February 29, 2012 Millennials will benefit and suffer due to their hyperconnected lives Main findings: Teens, technology, and human potential in 2020 By Janna Anderson and Lee Rainie Respondents’ thoughts Hyperconnected. Always on. These terms have been invented to describe the environment created when people are linked continuously through tech devices to other humans and to global intelligence. Teens and young adults have been at the forefront of the rapid adoption of the mobile internet and the always-on lifestyle it has made possible. The most recent nationally representative surveys of the Pew Internet Project show how immersed teens and young adults are in the tech environment and how tied they are to the mobile and social sides of it. Some 95% of teens ages 12-17 are online, 76% use social networking sites, and 77% have cell phones. Moreover, 96% of those ages 18-29 are internet users, 84% use social networking sites, and 97% have cell phones. Well over half of those in that age cohort have smartphones and 23% own tablet computers like iPads

Alvaro Retana, a distinguished technologist with Hewlett-Packard, expressed concerns about humans’ future ability to tackle complex challenges. “The short attention spans resulting from the quick interactions will be detrimental to focusing on the harder problems, and we will probably see a stagnation in many areas: technology, even social venues such as literature,” he predicted. “The people who will strive and lead the charge will be the ones able to disconnect themselves to focus on specific problems.”

Melissa Ashner, a student at the College of William and Mary, observed, “People report having more difficulty with sustained attention (i.e., becoming immersed in a book).

They believe that students’ habitual use of shorthand is affecting their ability to write grammatically correct sentences – a skill they need not only to write term papers but one that will serve them their entire life.

“They do not capitalize words or use punctuation anymore,” says Terry Wood, a teacher with 10 years of in-class experience

[Texting] is becoming such a problem that teachers must explain why using the shortcut language is not acceptable in the business world,