Thursday 21 January 2010

Texting and spelling

An article on page 16 of yesterday's Independent caught my eye.

Richard Garner reported that a study by the British Academy found that children who texted regularly were better spellers and had higher scores in verbal reasoning tests.

I found this news strangely uplifting and not really surprising. Although I did note, when following up details of the research on the Coventry University site, that the study involved only 63 children between the ages of 4 and 7. The Coventry University page also includes an interesting list of 'textisms' (I'd never come across this term before) that breaks the different forms of text message abbreviations into ten distinct categories. Fascinating stuff!

Further details about the research carried out by Dr Clare Wood can be found at http://www.coventry.ac.uk/latestnewsandevents/a/5695