It looks like the rise and rise of text messaging is severely impacting our future generation and their ability to communicate successfully. According to several news items yesterday, including the Daily Mail, this Telegraph article and the BBC, text-message “lingo” is creeping into exam papers more and more frequently. Reports state…
“Following a report by the Edexcel exam board a reminder was issued to teachers that they should discourage pupils from using “street language and text style”
Examples given in the report include writing the word “shouda” for “should have”, “m8” for “mate” and the use of lower case for the first person singular “I”.
The verb forms “shouda”, “gonna”, “ain’t” and “wanna”, appeared with surprising regularity, the examiners said.”
The reports went onto say that even “extremely able students” had trouble differentiating between “their, there and they’re”. I have to confess that some emails I receive are starting to look this way too! 🙁
Sources – BBC News – Daily Telegraph