Texting good 4 spelling & reading: Study

In a study of students' texting habits, the British Academy British Academy found no support for the "negative media and public speculation" around young people's texting. In fact, the Wall Street Journal reports, "the kids who used more 'textisms' – abbreviations such as “plz” (please) and “l8ter” (later) [shouldn't that be "l8er"?] – showed higher scores on some spelling, phonetics, reading comprehension and other English language competency tests." The study's authors are Coventry University psychology Profs. Beverly Plester and Clare Wood. In three separate studies of groups of 60-90 8-to-12-year-olds, they found, among other things, that 1) "the proportions of textisms that kids used in their sentence translations was positively linked to verbal reasoning; the more textspeak kids used, the higher their test scores" and 2) "the younger the age at which the kids had received mobile phones, the better their ability to read words and identify patterns of sound in speech." [See also "Major study on youth & media: Let's take a closer look"]