By Jim Norton

It has been hailed as the death of spelling and punctuation.

But in fact texting does not affect children’s grammar and spelling, a new study has found.

Researchers claim there is no evidence to suggest youngsters using textspeak – where young people miss punctuation and shorten words in messages – affected their understanding of English.

Instead, the results suggested the use of slang in text messages actually improved spelling and grammar among primary and secondary pupils.

The findings come just months after a leading headmistress warned that children sending poorly written messages via text and social media to each other was one of the biggest challenges facing teachers.

The study by Coventry University and the University of Tasmania analysed text messages sent by 234 primary school, secondary school and university students over a two-day period.

Researchers then compared the messages to the students’ performance on five formal tests that measured their cognitive ability, grammar and spelling abilities.

This was repeated one year later to see how texting had affected the development of their language skills over time.

The results, published in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology, found that primary school children’s use of ungrammatical word forms – such as using ‘they is’ rather than ‘they are’ – at the beginning of the project were actually positively linked to spelling ability 12 months later.

Similarly, secondary school children’s use of ungrammatical word forms and omission of punctuation and capitalisation were all positively associated with growth in the children’s spelling ability over the course of a year.

The findings by Coventry University and the University of Tasmania came months after a leading headmistress warned one of the biggest challenges facing teachers was children sending poorly written messages (file pic)

Clare Wood, Professor of Psychology in Education at Coventry University’s Centre for Research in Psychology, Behaviour and Achievement said: ‘Our previous work has shown that the reason why we see positive associations between use of texting slang and spelling outcomes is because many of the most commonly used forms of text abbreviation are phonetically based.

‘So when children are playing with these creative representations of language they have to use and rehearse their understanding of letter-sound correspondences: a skill which is taught formally as phonics in primary classrooms.

‘So texting can offer children the chance to practice their understanding of how sounds and print relate to each other.’

But the findings challenge claims that a generation of children are leaving school without a proper grasp of spelling and grammar because of the impact of so-called textspeak.

In March, Caroline Jordan, headteacher at a top private girls’ school in Oxford, said youngsters were in danger of growing up with limited vocabularies because they spend so much of their free time on sites such as Twitter and Facebook instead of reading.

At the time, she wrote in a blog post: ‘Our English skills are constantly on display, often making the difference between landing a job and having a misspelled application filed in the bin.

‘With the continuing reliance on technology, “textspeak” is eroding hard-learned skills in such basic areas as spelling and grammar.’

A previous poll of 500 teachers found that many youngsters used colloquialisms in formal written work, with phrases such as ‘Macbeth was pure mental’ and ‘Romeo was a numpty wasn’t he?’

Source: Mail Online