The research done is on college students academic writing and if it is affected by texting. An online survey was created to complete the research. All respondents were Kean University students ages 18 and above. Only 23 Kean University students responded to the 11 question survey.
Introduction and Background:
Over the years communication has changed drastically. We began using phones in 1876 when the first phone was created. Since then it has been revolutionized and now instead of having an immobile phone we have a phone that allows someone to not only call another, but also allow one to text another person.
Billions of people today are so used to using their thumbs to text somebody a short messages like “hey, how r u,” that the language has changed drastically since texting became available. Texting, otherwise known as short message service or SMS, is composing and sending short messages to one or more persons. People, mainly those ages 11 through 30, write text messages with acronyms otherwise known as abbreviated words like “lol” (laughing out loud) or “omg” (oh my gosh or “oh my god).
Texting has been around for a few decades now and at this point it seems as if the masters of this form of communication are college students. In college it is known that students are assigned a lot of academic papers. So does texting affect a college students writing? With that question in mind research began and a lot of information was found on how texting may affect a middle-school aged students writing. Fortunately, research has also been done on texting and if it affects a college students writing.
Lit Review:
A few articles speak on this topic. For example, one of the article includes research conducted by Latisha Asmaak Shafie, Norizul Azida, Nazira Osman in Malaysia. The article SMS Language and College Writing: The languages of the College Texters, focuses on college-aged students who text on a daily basis. The research consisted of 264 participants or as mentioned in the article, texters, all of them were aged 18 to 22 and 170 of the participants were female while 94 of them were male. The research included students in six classes. As mentioned in the journal, all participants were either first year students or second year students at a university in Malaysia (Shafie).
Then there is the article The Writing Lives of College Students. This article also surveys college students and text messages. But instead of focusing on all students the researchers focused on a group of first year students. The researchers grabbed 1,366 students who were enrolled in a first year writing course from seven colleges across the country of United States. The researchers also did not only focused on texting but also focused on what students are writing in class and outside of class. They also gave out surveys, asking students which type of written communication they favored the most; which type of written communication are most valued and so forth.
Another research article used for this research is Txt msg n school literacy: does texting and knowledge of text abbreviations adversely affect children’s literacy attainment? by Beverly Plester, Clare Wood and Victoria Bell, which was on how students in middle school are affected by texting. These students are aged between 11 and 12 years of age. The reason for choosing these test subjects is because at this age, students should know how to read and write at a high level. This research was done in England and the study used 65 students. The result of the test was that out of 90 percent of the students using phones, 96 percent of them texted. So, doing a test on those who did text and does who didn’t, the writing grammar in each group was different.
In the research article it was mentioned how students texted. For example, those who texted used acronyms like ‘NE1’ for the word anyone, ‘2night’ for tonight, and ‘CU’ for see you. Using these abbreviated words on a daily basis can impact a child’s writing drastically as it shows in the results. The results showed that those who hadn’t text did perfectly well on CAT (otherwise known as Cognitive Abilities Test) test, while those who did text had trouble spelling simple words like girlfriend, and the punctuation was poor.
Although the mention above journal talks about middle school aged students, it shows that students at a young age can still be affected by texting. So what will happen down the road when these children become college students? If texting affects students at a young age it can affect them at the age of 20.
The above articles mention research to if and how texting can affect negatively a student’s writing but the journal Analysis of Research on the Effects of Texting and Tweeting on Literacy does just the opposite. As a matter of fact it tells briefly as to why it might actually help with academic writing. As said in the journal, which was written by Michael S. Mills who attended University of Central Arkansas, that college students are able to communicate in more than one way allowing students to sharpen their communication skills. Because of this their written communication skills can be affected greatly.
The research done at Kean University helps fill in some of the gaps in the research mentioned above. For example, in the research article The Writing Lives of College Students, the limitation is that the research only focused on one class. The research done at Kean University grabs students in the sophomore, junior, senior and graduate classes.
In the SMS Language and College Writing: The languages of the College Texters article, the research focused only on students who are only in their first or second year of college. There should have been broader range of students because of the number of students that participated in the research. For the article Analysis of Research on the Effects of Texting and Tweeting on Literacy, there was not a lot of research in the article to help support its claim. Although the author of the article did due research, he did not put enough information about the research done.
Methods:
The participants used for the research were college students aged 18 and over. The students involved included 2 sophomores, 13 juniors, 6 seniors and 2 graduate students. Those who weren’t at least 18 years were not able to submit a form. The majors of the students that participated included psychology, design, political science, communications, criminal justice, accounting, biology, marketing, English, fine arts, communication, journalism, and K-8 education with a majority of the students being psychology majors. Although 23 students participated, not everyone answered all questions.
All students were asked a series of questions about their texting habits and about academic writing. The survey given was created on Google Forms so every response has been recorded online. The survey consisted of 11 questions and included questions like:
- Do you text message a person (or more) while writing academic papers?
Give a text message example to the message sent by a friend or family member ‘Someone just rear-ended me!’
- Students are given a lot of writing assignments during his or her educational life; do you believe that texting affects one’s writing? Why?
- For all questions refer to the Appendix after reference page
Discussion:
When asked about how many texts are composed on a daily basis (appendix question 1), it came to no surprise that 47 percent of the participants compose and send over 30 messages a day. Not only that but a majority of the participants, roughly 69 percent, said that they have been texting for a minimum of five years. When asked if the usage of acronyms occurs while texting (appendix question 2) 22 of the 23 respondents said yes. The reason: “To speed up the texting process;” or to “shorten responses;” some even said “It is natural to do so at this point. It just happens without me thinking about it.” Oddly enough, though, when asked to write as many acronyms as one can (appendix, question 3), the response was:
- Lol (laugh out loud)
- NP (no problem)
- OMG (oh my gosh)
- OMW(on my way)
All of the mentioned acronyms are common day-to-day acronyms used in text messages. There was nothing out of the ordinary about the acronyms mentioned.
When asked if texting can affect a student’s writing (appendix question 5) 17 of the participants responded yes. The reason for the answer is because many of the participants believed that some students become lazy while texting and will sometimes forget to be ‘professional,’ while writing academic papers. Those who responded with a no, said that students should be able to not confuse academic writing with texting because college students have been taught how to write correctly from a young age.
To help further the investigation, participants were asked to give a sample paragraph from an academic paper (appendix question 9). About three or five of the students did not answer the question. Some said that they were being asked to do too much. But after reading the samples that were submitted it seem as if college students are able to differentiate between composing a text message and writing an academic paper.
Below is an example of how students are able to not confuse writing an academic paper and writing a text message: An example of a student’s’ 200 word sample: “Traditional Pueblo culture inhabits a social implementation of which I have never seen before. The people of Laguna placed a strong acceptance on one another and viewed every person as rare and beautiful. Occupations that in today’s world would be considered as social stigmas (such as hunting and basket weaving) are seen as an equal chance for all whom fit the job whether it be man or women.
There is no hierarchy among humans, and men and women are considered the same. They even go as far as to state that, “In the old pueblo worldview, we are all a mixture of men and women.” Animals are similarly considered equal amongst humans as well as plants and rocks. Physical beauty has no place in society and everyone should look out for survival and well being, without being held burden to physical attractiveness or social status. In the modern world, we view physical attractiveness and social status as two defining characteristics. Money and looks are the two universally accepted statutes, and are a must for anyone looking to advance their social status. So if the Laguna people did not care about social status then why do we?”
A sample of a text message (refer to the appendix question7) same student mentioned above: “That’s so funny lol. What’s the full story?”
As seen above the student wrote a text message using an acronym (lol) in his or her text message example. In the student’s 200 sample paragraph taken from an academic paper, not a single acronym and the student follows basic English grammar and spelling rules.
A limitation in the research is that not all participants answered all of the questions presented to them. With only 23 respondents, it makes it difficult to really understand if a college students’ academic writing can be affected by texting. Another limitation is the number of responses received. Only 23 students responded to the survey and that isn’t enough to do a thorough investigation on this topic. Reading the other research articles, they had between 200 and over 1,000 student responders.
Conclusion:
Overall, with the research, it has been founded that texting does not affect a college students writing. It has been shown that students can differentiate text message language and academic writing. But college students have been writing academic papers for years now and a majority of them have only been texting for under a decade. So for college students there is still a fine line between texting and writing academic papers. Some of the journals mentioned above will agree. But who knows, this data may be inadmissible ten years from now since language continues to change and in today’s society, it is normal to see young children texting.
References
- (Y Grabill, J., Hart-Davidson, W., Pigg, S., Curran, P., McLeod, M., Moore, J., . Rumsey, S. (2010). The Writing Lives of College Students Revisualizing Composition Study Group Mills, M. (2014). Analysis of Research on the Effects of Texting and Tweeting on Literacy. In M. Searson & M. Ochoa (Eds.), Proceedings of Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference 2014 (pp. 1996-1997). Chesapeake, VA: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE).
- Plester, B., Wood, C., & Bell, V. (2008). Txt msg n school literacy: Does texting and knowledge of text abbreviations adversely affect children’s literacy attainment? Literacy, 137-144.
