Professors Move To Eliminate Chatspeak

Some professors are not too pleased with the way text message abbreviations are infiltrating the classroom.

The Contra Costa Times reports:

Faculty members increasingly have expressed irritation about reading acronyms and abbreviations they often do not understand, said Sally Murphy, a Cal State East Bay professor and director of the university's general-education program. One e-mail to a professor started with, "Yo, teach," she said.

"It has a real effect on the tone of professionalism," said Murphy, who also has seen younger instructors use the shorthand. "We tell them very specifically how this is going to affect them in life. It's kind of like wearing their jeans below their butt. They're going to lose all credibility."

Cal State East Bay instructor Alejo Enriquez has gone so far as to explicitly banned text-message speak from e-mail correspondence in his class syllabus.

A 2008 study of high school and middle school students by the Pew Internet & American Life Project that found a majority of them had used chatspeak and emoticons in class assignments.

Teens generally do not believe that technology negatively influences the quality of their writing, but they do acknowledge that the informal styles of writing that mark the use of these text-based technologies for many teens do occasionally filter into their school work. Overall, nearly two-thirds of teens (64%) say they incorporate some informal styles from their text-based communications into their writing at school.

What do you think? Is this a matter to LOL at?

Comments

[tones]

10:24 PM on 04/13/2010

The one thing that pissed me off the most in college was the professors lack to want to learn about Tech or even know how to use it. They all claim to be far to old to learn new tech but they have no problem plowing through an all new subject.

Professors need to get with the times. You are teaching young adults maybe u should know something about their trends so u can some what engage with them beyond grading their papers.

[BlueAsh]

09:57 AM on 04/13/2010

The way I see it: If one can't go "Yo, boss," to his potential employer for a professional job, then one should not use that language in college writing.

[Cryostatic]

08:14 AM on 04/13/2010

Noble goal. Good luck with that.

[mamacat]

04:59 AM on 04/13/2010

I "get" some of the abbreviations, such as "BTW", but "LOL" seems childish and trite.

[kingstupka]

11:57 PM on 04/12/2010

Time and place kids.

[Bigrcube]

02:45 PM on 04/13/2010

Like in an English Grammar or Lit class........NOT the time. Or in ANY other college level class setting in written communications, essays, term papers, on tests, etc.

[REDSTATEREFUGEE]

11:33 PM on 04/12/2010

I read and edit about 100 papers a week for my classes and rarely encounter chatspeak in them. I guess its my grey hair that dissuades students from using those colloquial forms of language.

I do experience two related problems: (1) As some have noted, students sometimes think that profs can be addressed as peers in e-mails, but this is a function of a general decline in respect in our society, rather than technology, and (2) Cellular-addiction in the classroom is epidemic. There is often an inverse correlation between student success and frequency of text-messaging.

There is some hope, however, for my older students are more seasoned, more attentive, and less likely to be cellular addicts. The above problems are age-related....

[roxanne90]

07:55 PM on 04/13/2010

I agree! Chatspeak /text speak is not as much a problem as students using cell phones during class. They especially do so in large classes and wrongly think it has no impact on their attention and hence understanding of material (not to mention distracting to fellow students and to professor/instructor). This problem has gotten expotentially more problematic in the last year.

[shthar]

08:57 PM on 04/12/2010

How darethy ye not typeth the proper speaketh parteth.

[DragonBuddha06]

08:12 PM on 04/12/2010

Language has to evolve. I once had an Asian History professor who likened reading a copy of Beowulf in the original English to deciphering Chinese characters. However, formal speech and writing have their places, as do casual tones. Learning when and where to use each vernacular is imperative for a college student. A political professor of mine examined each paper of ours as if it was a formal piece to be submitted to any random committee, magazine, or journal. I would be greatly disappointed if I saw random emoticons in Time or chatspeak in Scientific American. There is a time and place for everything, and scholastic works should not involve the slang of the day.

[hayleyfly]

02:12 PM on 04/12/2010

Language naturally evolves, so I don't think there's any need for attempts to do away with text/chatspeak completely. However, people -- children and adults alike! -- need to learn when certain speech is appropriate. When I was in middle school and high school (which is not so long ago -- late 1990s, early 2000s, just as cell phone use was beginning to increase exponentially), we were taught that contractions were inappropriate in formal, academic papers. To this day, I only use contractions in informal correspondence, such as emails or texts to friends and family. I almost never use chatspeak. Even when texting or sending instant messages, where such abbreviations were first created, I still tend to spell everything out. I think even more alarming that the increasing use of chatpseak is the general and complete disregard for basic grammar rules concerning punctuation and capitalization. So many people, even in professional work or academic settings, write in run-on sentences that I have to wonder about their intellectual abilities. This isn't splitting hairs over the Oxford comma or using one space or two to separate sentences. How difficult is it to use period and hit the shift key occasionally??