ABSTRACT
As summarised at the end of the last chapter, the empirical work conducted into both exposure to misspellings and use of textisms in text-messaging-based tasks suggests that there is no reason to be concerned about children’s use of text abbreviations and the impact that it may be having on children’s developing literacy abilities. In fact, if the work is suggestive of anything, it is that the associations are positive rather than negative. However, despite the pattern of results from these studies being consistent in their message, the studies themselves are limited in what they can tell us about the actual development of children’s literacy abilities. That is, the literature reported so far has relied on concurrent data; data collected from one time point, thereby offering the researcher a snapshot of children’s literacy skills and text-messaging performance. However, just because there is a relationship between two variables at one point in time, it does not necessarily follow that there is a relationship between textism use and the emergence or development of literacy skills. Also, correlations between variables collected concurrently do not inform discussions of cause and effect. There are, however, two studies (one longitudinal study and one intervention study) which have been published which do offer insight into the development of written language skills in relation to children’s actual use of text-message abbreviations and enable us to examine the issue of causality. These are reviewed in the sections that follow.
