M. Swan claimed here that “it’s important to keep an eye on what is happening, so as to be able to answer students’ questions about new usage, and to be able to modify traditional explanations as this becomes necessary” *
[**Aside: But he also claims that Teachers don't need to worry too much – English as a whole is not changing fast, and most of the language will stay the same for some time to come. And I wonder, really? Which English, after all?**]
Keeping an eye on what’s happening then: English language teachers, English language learners: would you teach / would you like to learn Txtspeak?
Shouldn’t learners know what asap, b/c, afaik, imho, brb, b4, aka, etc. mean? These are very common in business speak, for instance. There’s even a poll on whether teaching txtspeak or not at the BBC Teaching English site and a complete lesson here. For an exhaustive list of txt shorthands, please visit this wiki.
What’s your vote, then? Do you think txt speak can come in handy?
9 Comments
I definitely think we should be teaching text speak. It’s another genre of communication and one that our students may well need to use and understand.
Iwrote an activity for students to try based around a controversial UK poster. You can see it here:
http://daily-english-activities.blogspot.com/2008/09/english-texting-language.html
Hope it’s useful.
Best
Nik Peachey
Hi Nik…I totally agree. Read this text a Twine member shared with us: “Schools embrace txt msg“, from the Salt Lake Tribune (April 09).
Thanks. Nice article. Thought ou might also be interested in this 6 min test of your chat acronyms. I’m afraid I didn’t do very well on it!!
http://www.sporcle.com/games/chatacronyms.php
Best
Nik
I believe txtspeak should be taught
as a class, I mean they have ebonics
right?
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Hello,
I completely agrees that language and text speak and we should work to make our students enable to understand text speak. Nice and comprehensive thought
Hi,
Great site by the way. I would agree that teaching ‘text speak’ is increasingly important, or useful, given the frequency with which it is inevitably used – even if the student then chooses not to use it, it is useful to understand, given that it can appear in other situations outside of mobile phones, such as advertising and publicity material. It is in fact a topic I intend to cover very soon in my own English blog!
I wrote a book on note-taking for businessmen. In it I included an entire table with “txt speak short-cuts for people to use when they are learning “Accelerated Writing.”
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