Ms.
Meera Baby,
faculty of Govt. College, Kanjirmkulam,
presented a paper entitled
‘Texting and Fossilization’ at the International Seminar on Innovative English Language Teaching
organized by the Centre for English Language Teaching, University of Kerala and
the Government College For Women, Trivandrum on 26th July 2010. The following are notes prepared during the presentation.
*Texting
is a colloquial term referring to the exchange of brief written message.
*There
has been a hike in texting over the years. For instance the number of text messages
sent during 2001 was 250 billion and in 2004 it was 500 billion!
*We
have to admit that text message is the new lingo.
*Texting
forces us to morph our language. There is a tendency to be economic for the
more the words the more the charge.
Some
sample SMS forms
10X for
thanks
4 for for
MSG
for message
UR for your
GUD
for good
HV for have
L8R for later
NY1 for anyone
YruL8 for
Why are you late?
RU
for Are you?
*A
study done in the University of California shows that the written language of
those who do a lot of texting is poor.
*David
Crystal’s book titled ‘txtng : the gr8
db8’ (Texting : The Great Debate) states
that the language of texting doesn’t make people bad communicators, but makes people good at language. The presenter
displayed the following poem written in texting style originally from David Crystal'on her
PowerPoint slide.
A
txt msg pom
his
is r bunsn brnr bl%
his
hair lyk fe filings
w ac/dc
going thru
I
sit to him in kemistry,
it
splits my @oms
When
he -:) @ me
Julia Bird
*We
need to realize that a stage comes when
we are not able to overcome the habit of using textism. It leads to
fossilization- a rather permanent phenomenon of a learner’s interlanguage
getting stuck at any stage during the Target language (TL) learning process.
Before
ending the presentation with a ‘10X 4 ur
time’ statement, the following was
displayed with a caricature of
Shakespeare with a speech bubble : Ah Twitter
2
b/nt
2
b
dtz
d
Q
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