Texting and literacy skills

I happened upon a BBC article about texting supposedly not having any negative impact on literacy skills, in particular the ability to spell. The claim is that it ties in nicely with phonics and students need to understand how a word is actually spelled and the phonetics in order to shorten it.

As a language educator and a technology in learning enthusiast who has often given presentations on using cellphones and texting for learning, I'm doubtful. I'm mostly doubtful because the study is based on English speakers. As a rather fluent speaker of Spanish, a very phonetic language where there is only 1 silent letter and the vowels sound the same regardless of where they are in a word, and a native speaker of English, a language which is far from phonetic, I'm just not buying it.

Now, that isn't to say that if your students are not learning the literacy skills they should have it is the fault of texting. I'm just not believing that there is a positive impact on their ability to spell. I think there are many factors involved and that there are other skills to be gained from texting. In fact as a language educator it is becoming increasingly important to teach students proper texting abbreviations in the target language. In many countries computers aren't as ubiquitous as in the US but cellphones are everywhere and they all have inexpensive texting plans (something that the US is behind on.) For a student to go overseas for school or work, they will need to know texting abbreviations to communicate with those they befriend during their stay.

So, the final study of the impact of texting on English literacy won't be complete until next year. Regardless, I don't think any changes in our literacy are only a result of one factor and with respect to texting, I'm not convinced that the impact is one of improved spelling. What are your thoughts/predictions of the final study?

Life on the road

Last week I presented seminars to K-16 language educators on the east coast. It was both one of the craziest and most rewarding experiences I have had in a long time. I now understand how musicians on tour mess up and say "Hello Chicago" when they are actually in Detroit. My trip was 5 states in 5 days. It was kind of nuts. I started in Burlington, VT. From there, along with my program manager/logistics guru, we drove to Manchester, NH followed by Waltham, MA near Boston. From there we flew to Philadelphia, drove to Cherry Hill, NJ and then on to State College, PA. Each day I presented a 5 hour seminar to some amazing language educators. While I didn't always know which state/city I was in at the time, and therefore avoided saying it out loud, I was so energized by the participants that location was completely irrelevant.

My topic was emerging technologies in the language classroom. While I covered more options than any one teacher could possibly take on, my participants all offered me some phenomenal new ways of using technologies that I hadn't tried out before. I came away each day with one or two more ideas and approaches. Web 2.0 is about a collective intelligence. That definitely came alive with the sharing and collaboration of my participants each day.

Since my return I have had contact with a number of my participants and I hope that they will keep in touch to tell me where they end up going with their new ideas. More importantly, I hope they continue to use our seminar website and communicate with each other. It's that collaboration and communication on a regular basis that helps us all with our professional development in times when funds are too tight to provide much in the way of opportunity.