Fangqin Li
Professional Project Proposal
Introduction and literature review and method
04/09/08
Introduction
Text messaging, also known as SMS (Short Message Service), is becoming more and more popular with young people in society, and is going to become a main method of keeping in touch instantly amongst people. Its personal, private, instant and convenient function makes it fashionable, because it can help you find anyone directly in a brief time without being seen by other person. SMS does fit young people’s fast-food life style, and is going to change computer’s social role: it is no longer the only high-tech communicative way today. And the most important thing is its text-based language seems that affects the social language in our daily life, nonetheless, not all of people believe so.
This paper will introduce the background of text-messaging from some previous related research. It is concerned with SMS’s social impact, discussing its affect on English usage. This study relies on the analysis of its data collected from student and teacher surveys. It will try to figure out the reasons for using the text messaging and attitudes towards text messaging and how text messaging, especially its abbreviations, affects people’s English use.
Literature review
New high-tech IT product-Text Messaging is becoming very popular with people in the world since it is one famous function of mobile phone, more and more young people treat it as their main entertainment, which caused many social researchers’ curiosity and attention. “The Mobile Data Association shows that 1.7 billion text-messages were exchanged in Britain in May 2003 – a cumulative annual total of some 8 billion messages.” (Thurlow, 2006). These huge numbers of frequency tells us it has become a part of people’s life. According to a report from findings that released by The Nielsen Co., based on an in-depth study on the mobile media and cross-media behavior of U.S. shows that 35% of teens (age 8-12) own a mobile phone, 20% of teens have used text messaging. Another group of data from Cyberatlas (2001) showed that half of all 7- 16-year-olds have their own mobile phone, 52% of which is girls and 44% of which is boys, and also 77% of 14-16-year-olds have mobile phones (Thurlow, 2006, p2). Those numbers not only mean that more and more young people become used to text-messaging, but also indicates female users is more likely to be the heaviest users (Thurlow, 2006), which certainly is big enough for making us to worry about young people’s future in language.
Eight years ago, John Humphrevs (2000) made a comment quoted in the heading, indicating a British radio journalist, Cameron (1995), worried about English will be threatened to ‘death’ by the effect of the new communication technology, cited in Thurlow, 2006. As a texting user, I am in this text-messaging culture circle and am seeing its development, and am a witness. Seeing people texting every day, I can’t help thinking if it will affect our language, because I concerned about its side effect- will it affect our traditional language in society, and will it make over the language, as long as I see people texting around me, while it brings us a joyful way to entertaining and communicating. By worrying about their language, Thurlow (2001a) expressed his opinion that net-based or web-based teen-talk has no positive effects on our standard, normal or “traditional” ways of expressing. He considered those young people who use mobile phones and text messaging as the same, worrying they are ruining the language-English.
Nonetheless, some other researchers hold different perspectives from those saying above. Such as Kasesniemi and Rautiainen (2002), they thought Text-messaging is not a bad thing, though, it made our communicative language changed a little bit, which actually is a code language, and gave young people a space to develop their creativity, cited in Thurlow, 2006. Another researcher Crystal (2001) made a statement that netspeak does even count to a part of history of language development. It is not going to make over our whole traditional language; by contrast, it represents the development of language and the culture in its own. It won’t replace our language, just like technologies won’t replace each other. TM is everywhere; it is in email, online chat, instant messaging, newsgroups and bulletin boards, WebPages and “virtual worlds”, maybe it is time for its emerging.
Can we take it as an independent thing to treat with? I mean can we avoid its effect on our language?
Methodology
This is a study about text-messaging and its effect of language. In order to gain an understanding of the text messaging and see if it affects our language, especially young people’s language, I am going to collect text messaging dialogue examples, and focus on analyzing its text abbreviations.
The participants will be the students and the faculty of Western Oregon University, no major, race, position limits. I will email all of them through the WOU email system at the beginning of this term (Spring 2008) by attaching with the link of the questionnaires’ website with two types of questions, which has all students email list and all faculty email list.
This online questionnaire was designed on SurveyMonkey.com contained two pages of student survey and one page of professor survey, including multi-choice, open-field, and one-choice questions. This questionnaires survey will take about two weeks to wait from collecting, analyzing and concluding, and its goal is to gather information from texting, through categorizing and analyzing the data, so I can know the pattern of text abbreviations, and then get a conclusion if the text-based language will affect our language. Questionnaire’s item included some basic questions as well as some developed questions.
During the period of survey, students will be encouraged to answer 19 questions in the students’ only questionnaire:
1. What is your gender?
2. What is your age?
3. What is your native language?
4. What do you think of Text Messaging?
5. How often do you use it?
6. Who are you texting to?
7. Do you use Abbreviations (for example, l8r, Sup, tmr, or lol)? If yes, what are they?
8. Are there any special abbreviations you use only when texting? If yes, what are they?
9. For what purposes do you use text messaging instead of communicating another way?
10. What kinds of topics do you talk about?
11. Do you use text abbreviations in class assignments?
12. Do you use text abbreviations in your class notes?
13. Do you use text abbreviations when you talk to your friends online (MySpace, Facebook, etc.)?
14. Do you use text abbreviations when you write emails?
15. Have you ever emailed the professor and used text abbreviations?
16. Have you ever been corrected by professors because of using text abbreviations?
17. Do you feel your spelling has gotten worse because you text a lot?
18. Do you use Text Messaging during class?
19. Have your professors used any abbreviations during the class? If yes, what are they?
During the period of survey, professors will be encouraged to answer 12 questions in the professors’ only questionnaire:
1. What is your gender?
2. What is your age?
3. What do you think of SMS (Short Message Service) or text-messaging?
4. How often do your students use Text Messaging in class?
5. Do you have rules banning cell phone in class? If yes, what rules?
6. Have you had students turn in papers with text abbreviations? If yes, what are they?
7. Have you used text abbreviations to comment on papers? If yes, what are they?
8. Have you received any emails from students with text abbreviations? If yes, what were they?
9. If you answered yes to the question above, did you correct this student's spelling or grammar?
10. Do you think your students' spelling has changed due to increases in text messaging?
11. Do you see changes in your students' written skills in the last five years? If yes, do you think the changes are related to text messaging?
12. Do you worry that the English language will deteriorate as a result of text messaging?
All information obtained from participants will remain confidential. It will be used to identify patterns common to many text messaging abbreviations, and also to develop verbal pictures of text messaging users.
Reference
Angel M.Y & Avin H.M Tong. (2007) Text-messaging Cultures of College Girls in Hong Kong: SMS as Resources for Achieving Intimacy and Gift-exchange with Multiple Functions. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies. Vol. 21, No. 2, June 2007, pp 303-315.
Allison, R. (2001) ‘Phone text chat “harm literacy”’, Guardian, Jan., 22, p.7.
Crystal D. (2008) Text message: Texting. ELT Journal Volume 62/1 January 2008; doi: 10,1093/elt/ccm080
Green, J. (2007) Language: Intrtxtlty. Critical Quarterly, vol. 49, no.3
Goggin, Gerard. “mobile text” M/C: A journal of Media and Culture http://www.media-culture.org.au/0401/03-goggin.php.
Harley, D., Sandra Winn, Sarah Pemberton & Paula Wilcox. (2007) Using texting to support students’ transition to university. Innovations in Education and Teaching International. Vol. 44, No. 3, August 2007, pp. 229-241.
Reid, D & Reid, F. (2004) Insights into the social and psychological effects of SMS text messaging. Available online at http://www.160characters.org/documents/SocialEffectsOfTextMessaging.pdf (accessed 10 March 2005).
Thurlow, C. (2003) Generation Txt? The sociolinguistics of young people’s text messaging, Discourse Analysis online, 1(1). Available online at: http:// extra.shu.ac.uk/daol/articles/y1/n1/a3/thurlow2002003-paper.html (accessed 12 January 2006).