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Texting And Teen Literacy

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Texting has become more and more common among younger aged children from about ages twelve to seventeen. As new phones begin to develop young kids have the urge to buy them to appear cool to their surrounding peers. In an ebook, Discourse of Text Messaging: Analysis of SMS Communication, written by Caroline Tagg reads this, “In 2010 it was estimated that 200,000 text messages were being sent every second, a three fold increase from 2007(Tagg p2). And it has also been calculated, by Ben Parr, that, “the average teenager now sends 3,339 texts per month(Parr).” This is an insane amount of texts. But little do these young teens know how this is greatly impacting their reading, writing, and speaking skills . Texting at a young age is very serious, is negatively affecting children’s literacy, and many of the problems that come with younger aged texting can easily be avoided. Correlation between texting and grammar Many surveys have been done to show that there is a direct correlation between teen literacy and teen texting. According to Megan Gannon, Live Science Contributor, a Northwestern researcher, named Drew Cingel, did a study on the effects of using homophones and other text slang when texting and how it affects one’s literacy. To do this, Drew Cingel took a group of middle school students in Pennsylvania, gave them each a grammar assessment test, and a asked them to answer couple survey questions. He asked the kids to record about how many texts they send and receive,

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