Texting Good or Bad? - Pt. 3

Against Texting. From the Sunday Times:

January 10, 2010

Text-talk teens lack the right words for work

Youngsters’ abbreviated forms of communication are hurting their chances of securing a job

Sian Griffiths and Chris Gourlay

A generation of teenagers risk making themselves unemployable because they are using a vocabulary of about 800 words a day, according to the government’s first children’s communication czar.

They are avoiding using a broad vocabulary and complex words in favour of the abbreviated “teenspeak” of text messages, social networking sites and internet chat rooms. Jean Gross, the government’s new adviser on childhood language development, is planning a national campaign to prevent children failing in the classroom and the workplace because of their inability to express themselves.

She said: “Teenagers are spending more time communicating through electronic media and text messaging, which is short and brief. We need to help today’s teenagers understand the difference between their textspeak and the formal language they need to succeed in life — 800 words will not get you a job.”

By the age of 16 the majority of teenagers have developed a broad vocabulary of 40,000 words. Linguists have found, however, that many choose to limit themselves to a much smaller range of words in regular conversation.

John Bald, a language teaching consultant and former Ofsted schools inspector, said: “There is undoubtedly a culture among teenagers of deliberately stripping away excess verbiage in language.

“When kids are in social situations, the instinct is to simplify. It’s part of a wider anti-school culture that exists among some children which parents and schools need to address.”

Gross said her concerns were sharpened by research by Tony McEnery, a professor of linguistics at Lancaster University. He has previously analysed 10m words of transcribed speech and 100,000 words gathered from teenagers’ blogs.

McEnery found that the top 20 words used by teenagers, including “yeah”, “no” and “but”, account for about a third of all words used. Others included “chenzed”, meaning tired or drunk, “spong”, meaning silly, and “lol”, the internet shorthand for “laugh out loud”.

McEnery’s research was sponsored by Tesco, the supermarket giant, whose chief executive, Sir Terry Leahy, recently raised concerns about the “woefully low standards” in schools that cause employers problems. This weekend McEnery said teenagers’ “productive lexicon” of regularly used words was smaller than for older speakers, but was much larger than 800 words.

Gross’s campaign will be launched next year and is set to target primary and secondary schools. She intends to ask Stephen Fry, the actor and author, to back it. She said: “I want teenagers going into workplaces and making videos of how people communicate and then putting them on YouTube for others to study.”

She wants parents to limit children under the age of two to half an hour of television a day, because she says that it crowds out conversation.

According to a recent study from Sheffield University, a teenager knows about 40,000 words and a graduate knows 60,000 or more.

In the 1920s Charles Kay Ogden, a pioneer of simplified language techniques, devised Basic English — a lexicon of 850 words that was sufficient, he said, to communicate. A range of 1,000 words is regarded as the minimum for nonnative speakers to understand basic English.

David Crystal, honorary professor of linguistics at Bangor University in Wales, said many experts underestimate the breadth and complexity of a teenager’s vocabulary. “The real issue here is that people object to kids having a good vocabulary for hip-hop and not for politics. They have an articulate vocabulary for the kind of things they want to talk about,” he said. “Few academics get anywhere near measuring that vocabulary.”

Word count
 - Teenagers have a total vocabulary of 40,000- 50,000 words, but they only use a fraction of this on a daily basis

- An average six-year-old knows 9,000-13,000 words

- A new word is created every 98 minutes, according to Global Language Monitor, which studies the development of English

- Last year English acquired its one millionth word or term: “web 2.0”. The total includes slang and words shaped by other languages