According to a study recently published by a doctoral student at Northwestern University, middle school students who regularly use “texting-language,” or shorten words when writing texts or emails, may be forgetting rules of grammar.

Drew Cingel interviewed over 200 seventh and eighth grade students and asked them how frequently they used shortcuts such as typing @ instead of “at,” or U instead of “you.” After the students completed the interviews, they all took a grammar test. Cingel found that students who reported using texting-language the most scored the lowest on their grammar tests.

The researcher suggests that teachers can help students write appropriately in school settings by assigning writing tasks that are very different from texting tasks. For example, a student who is likely to use texting shortcuts when asked to write a letter may avoid doing so when asked to write a formal essay. This evidence suggests that students may have knowledge of grammar, but not of the different contexts for writing.

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