Exploring Digital Communication

Language in Action

Caroline Tagg

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317539094
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Languages & Linguistics
• Thema: Linguistics

Routledge Introductions to Applied Linguistics is a series of introductory level textbooks covering the core topics in Applied Linguistics, primarily designed for those beginning postgraduate studies or taking an introductory MA course, as well as advanced undergraduates. Titles in the series are also ideal for language professionals returning to academic study.

The books take an innovative 'practice to theory' approach, with a 'back-to-front' structure. This leads the reader from real-world problems and issues, through a discussion of intervention and how to engage with these concerns, before finally relating these practical issues to theoretical foundations.

Exploring Digital Communication aims to discuss real-world issues pertaining to digital communication, and to explore how linguistic research addresses these challenges. The text is divided into three sections (Problems and practices; Interventions; and Theory), each of which is further divided into two subsections which reflect linguistic issues relating to digital communication.

The author seeks to demystify any perceived divide between online and offline communication, arguing that issues raised in relation to digital communication throw light on language use and practices in general, and thus linguistic interventions in this area have implications not only for users of digital communication but for linguists' general understanding of language and society.

Including relevant research examples, tasks and a glossary, this textbook is an invaluable resource for postgraduate and upper undergraduate students taking New Media or Communication Studies modules within Applied Linguistics and English Language courses.

Section B

Interventions

I

Digital language and literacy

9 Why digital communication may be good for literacy

Introduction

In Chapter 1, we saw that concerns about the unconventional spelling used in digital communications tend often to be based on scare stories in the media which feed into adults’ natural fears about and misunderstanding of what young people are doing. Applied linguistics researchers have drawn on empirical research – research grounded in analysis of online data – to reach conclusions about digital spellings which challenge the media hype. Firstly, spelling variants (or textisms) occur much less frequently than is often assumed; secondly, the textisms usually used are not randomly deployed but follow orthographical principles, thus reflecting spellings used in other kinds of writing; and, thirdly, these spelling variants can be seen as an important meaning-making resource – that is, the choice of an unconventional spelling over the standard form conveys meaning. Meanwhile, experimental research shows that engagement in digital communication correlates positively with strong spelling skills. The argument in this chapter is that if children are able to play with spellings when communicating by SMS text message or the internet, this may signal a strong grasp of the underlying orthographic principles – they have to know the rules before they can bend them.

I start by looking at the last finding mentioned above – the correlation between digital communication and good literacy skills. Literacy, in this chapter, is used in a rather narrow sense to refer to the ability to spell and to manage other basic writing skills – in Chapters 10 and 17 I take an increasingly broader view of literacy. I explain this correlation by exploring how people use language to express themselves in digital communications and how these practices relate to spelling patterns in non-digital texts.

Digital communication and literacy – a positive correlation?

Since around 2007, a growing body of linguistics and psychology research has explored the correlation between digitalese (or the use of textisms) and the literacy skills of children (aged between 8 and 12), adolescents (12–17), and young adults (18–25). The focus is on SMS text messaging, with some attention paid to instant messaging (IM) platforms (Geertsema et al., 2011; Rosen et al., 2010; Spatafora, 2008; Varnhagen et al., 2010; Winzker et al., 2009), but findings are likely to be relevant to recent applications such as WhatsApp, Line and Facebook which similarly encourage synchronous conversations. The research covers various English-speaking countries, chiefly the UK, USA, Australia and Canada, with some work carried out in Malaysia (Shafie et al., 2010), South Africa (Winzker et al., 2009; Geertsema et al., 2011) and Ghana (Dansieh, 2011). As this list suggests, the main focus is on native speakers of English, but there is some consideration of non-native speakers (Winzker et al., 2009; Shafie et al., 2010) and other languages, including Finnish (Plester et al., 2011) and Dutch (Radstake, 2010; Spooren, 2009). However, there is very little English-language research into languages other than English. Methodologically, the research is divided into two approaches – a few studies adopt a user-informed approach to ascertain participants’ perceptions of the effect of digitalese on literacy (e.g. Geertsema et al., 2011), but the majority take a data-driven approach, where SMS are elicited through translation tasks (with participants asked to translate from standard English into digitalese and vice versa) or through invented scenarios (where participants are asked to write SMS appropriate for given contexts). The limitation of this work is that people may act differently in experimental contexts than in naturally occurring situations. Only a handful of studies collect naturally occurring SMS (Varnhagen et al., 2010; Wood et al., 2011) – that is, those sent as part of everyday communicative practices. In terms of findings, the research can be divided into studies reporting negative correlations, those reporting no clear correlation and those reporting positive correlations, the latter representing the majority of studies (Verheijen, 2013).

The user-informed studies tend to support anecdotal evidence by suggesting that teachers and students see digitalese as having a negative impact on literacy, as in Geertsema et al.’s (2011) South Africa study, which used questionnaires to ascertain what secondary-school teachers of English thought about the influence of digital communication on their students’ writing. Dansieh (2011) notes similarly negative attitudes among teachers and students in a Ghanaian university, where students were generally found to have a weak grasp of English. Drouin and Davis (2009) find that many students (in an American college) report a negative effect on their literacy practices, even where no such impact could be found by the researchers. However, only a limited amount of the experimental research comes to a similar conclusion. The use of digitalese is linked to weaker spelling and reading skills among American college students in one study (Drouin, 2011) and, in another, high-school students and undergraduates in Australia (De Jonge and Kemp, 2012). In some cases, existing levels of low literacy may explain the negative correlation (Rosen et al., 2010; Shafie et al., 2010). In their study of young American adults, Rosen et al. (2010) conclude that those with less education were more likely to ‘unintentionally’ transfer the practice to other types of informal writing, although this was not the case with more formal writing. Notably, no negative outcomes are reported for children’s literacy abilities (those aged 8–12).

Overwhelmingly, the research suggests that digitalese either has no impact at all on literacy or may actually lead to improvements. Studies reporting no correlation include those focusing on the spelling abilities of young adults from the States (Drouin and Davis, 2009; Massengill Shaw et al., 2007), Canadian adolescents (Varnhagen et al., 2010), and South African high-school students (Winzker et al., 2009). Positive correlations between the use of digitalese and good literacy skills have been found predominantly among children (Bushell et al., 2011; Kemp and Bushell, 2011; Plester et al., 2008; Wood et al., 2011) although also adolescents (Kemp, 2011; Durkin et al., 2011; Powell and Dixon, 2011). Methods and findings vary, but the generally positive conclusion ‘speaks against media claims that text messaging has a detrimental effect on spelling’ (Bushell et al., 2011, p. 34). For example, Bushell et al.’s (2011) study of 227 Australian children used questionnaires and translation tasks to ascertain their awareness and use of digitalese and measured their spelling ability with standardised spelling tests. They found that children who did better on the spelling tests produced more textisms in the translation task. In the UK, Plester et al. (2008) asked schoolchildren to translate between standard English and digitalese, and found similarly positive correlations between the number of textisms used and the scores achieved for verbal reasoning and spelling. The finding from across these studies is that children and adolescents appear able to move between digitalese and standard English. In other words, although mistakes are made, there is recognition among children that textisms are not appropriate in formal writing and should be avoided.

The question as to whether children and young people are able to play with their spelling because they can spell well, or whether playing with spellings improves their general spelling skills, is not something that all studies can address. This is because they find only a correlation between digitalese and literacy, rather than being able to specify whether there is a causal relationship and, if so, what causes what. Kemp (2011, p. 65), for example, speculates that the effect may be both ways:

It seems likely that young adults with stronger linguistic skills can better employ these strengths to create and decipher textisms than those with weaker linguistic skills. It is also possible that the language ‘play’ encouraged by extensive practice with textisms … helps to boost interest in language and thus scores on language tasks.

Regression analyses carried out by Beverly Plester and colleagues in the UK – analyses that allow them to explore the relationship between variables – suggest that digitalese may improve spelling. Wood et al. (2011), for example, collected SMS sent at the beginning and end of the school year and found that textism use at the start of the year could predict spelling ability throughout the year, but that children’s initial spelling ability could not predict variance in textism use at the end of the year. They concluded that digitalese was leading to improved spelling ability, rather than the other way around.

One interesting illustration of the informal learning that digital communications enable can be found in Blommaert and Velghe’s (2014) study of a severely dyslexic South African woman called Linda. Her problems with dyslexia were compounded by the poverty and marginalisation of the South African town in which she grew up: she dropped out of school and was unemployed at the time of the study. Her friends introduced her to the South African mobile IM platform, MXIT, which quickly became an important part of her life. Blommaert and Velghe note two interesting aspects of Linda’s learning of ‘textspeak’: firstly, it was scaffolded and ‘collective’; and, secondly, it impacted on her wider literacy skills. Linda’s friends helped her to compile a repertoire of phrases for use on MXIT and they responded to her messages in the spirit in which they were sent: as indicators of belonging and friendship, rather than in terms of their linguistic correctness. Linda invested a huge amount of time and effort in copying phrases she encountered on MXIT into notebooks (found ‘all over the house’), to use in her own MXIT posts. Linda’s offline writing increased alongside her online use of textspeak and became highly purposeful to her, and her writing skills were thus stimulated and expanded (Blommaert and Velghe, 2014).

To sum up, the conclusions drawn across the literature are somewhat mixed, due in part to the varied research designs (Verheijen, 2013, pp. 596–7). Nonetheless, the positive correlations found between digitalese and literacy skills are sufficient to challenge the assumption that digital communication is necessarily having a negative impact on literacy, and should encourage us to carefully consider the assumptions mooted in the press.

Spelling variants as a meaning-making resource

One question left largely unaddressed by the above studies is why there should be a correlation between digitalese and basic literacy skills. To address this question, we turn to descriptive linguistic studies seeking to categorise and explain spelling choices. What emerges is that very little spelling variation can be categorised as ‘misspelling’; instead, textisms are rule-based, reflect pre-digital patterns in spelling variation, and are thus better described as respellings (Sebba, 2007) – a neutral term for unconventional spelling that avoids the assumption that a word is misspelt and allows for the possibility that the spelling is meaningful.

Between 2004 and 2007 – perhaps the height of concern over spelling in SMS – I collected and analysed a corpus of over 11,000 SMS (‘CorTxt’). Although the SMS were not sent by children but by people ranging in age from 18 to their 60s, evidence suggests that their spelling reflected younger age groups (Shortis, pers. comm.). The texters were speakers of British English and texted almost entirely in English, and studies suggest a similarity in patterning across varieties of English in Nigeria (Chiluwa, 2008); South Africa (Deumert and Mas...