2013 UWI Schools of Education Biennial Conference

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The sociolinguistic influence of text messaging on writing English [PowerPoint presentation]
(2013-07-10) Daley-Morris, Paula; Devonish, Hubert
This presentation explores the sociolinguistic influence that young children's use of text messaging writing systems in their everyday lives have on their ability to write in Standard English in formal educational contexts. The issue of texting language's interference with the writings of children during schoolwork has come to the fore in recent times. Teachers and other educators have posited that this uneducative practice is an obstruction to good writing and disrupts literacy development. The researchers conducted an experiment to understand what happened when 72 Grade 5 Jamaican children were asked to write an essay, composition, or a few sentences using text messaging and later translate them into Standard English. This paper discusses the sociolinguistic practices that children employed in order to construct the samples that utilized text messaging language. It also explored the level of scribal accuracy that children were able to demonstrate through the translated samples. The findings that resulted explain the possible relationships that writing in text messaging has on children's writing in Standard English Language