Mobile technology and literacy: effects across cultures, abilities and the lifespan

In the space of a decade, the use of mobile technology as a means of communication has been adopted by children, adolescents and adults across the world. As part of this process, users have adapted written forms and conventions to create an abbreviated form of writing variously known as text-speak, textese or txt. Individuals use, for example, number homophones (2day), contractions (txt), sound-based spellings (skool) and initialisms (lol), to save on message length (Ling 2004), to build social relationships (Thurlow 2003) and/or simply to have fun with language (Crystal 2008). The popular media regularly expresses concern that the use of textese threatens conventional standards of reading and writing. However, intensive investigation is only just beginning on the potential impact of such mobile literacy practices on traditional literacy skills. This special issue brings together some current empirical research in this area with texters of different ages, abilities and cultures. Children are receiving their first mobile phones at younger and younger ages (Plester et al. 2009). In many developed countries, the majority of children have their own mobile phones by the upper years of primary school. At 9 to 12 years of age, children are still developing and consolidating their conventional reading and writing skills. This is perhaps why popular opinion suggests that frequent exposure to textese may disrupt conventional literacy development. The limited amount of experimental research that has been published in this area has shown that the links between textese use and literacy skills in children actually seem to be positive (e.g. Plester et al. 2008, 2009). Further work is needed to confirm these conclusions as mobile phone usage becomes more widespread, and to extend research to people of a range of ages, with differing literacy skills, in different countries, using the wider range of text input methods now available. The work reported here extends current research in some of these ways. The first four papers consider the links between the use of text-messaging language and conventional literacy skills in children in the upper primary school years, in three different countries. Coe and Oakhill report on phone and texting use in 10to 11-year-old British children, about two-thirds of whom had their own mobile phone. There were mostly positive links between textese use and conventional literacy skills: good readers used more textisms than poorer readers when composing a text message (regardless of phone ownership) and good readers were faster than poorer readers at reading messages in both standard English and textese. Thus, in line with previous findings from a similar population (Plester et al., 2008, 2009), reading skill in these children was positively related to the ability to produce and decipher textese, beyond any effects of practice with texting. To date, most of the published research on textese in school-aged children has been in the UK, where mobile phones were adopted relatively early and widely. In other countries, including Australia, children’s phone ownership has become widespread only more recently, and the patterns observed may therefore differ from in British studies. Kemp and Bushnell asked 10to 12-year-old Australian children (82% phone owners) to read and write text messages on mobile phones, in both standard English and textese. They also considered the effects of conventional language skills, texting experience and text entry method. ‘Predictive text’ entry was faster than ‘multi-press entry’, although multi-press experience made typing faster. Like Coe and Oakhill (this issue) and Neville (2003), Kemp and Bushnell found that children were slower and less accurate at reading aloud messages in textese than in standard English, although unlike in previous research, using textisms in their typing did not make children any faster at message composition. It seems that at least in this Accepted: 28 October 2010 Correspondence: Nenagh Kemp, School of Psychology, Locked Bag 30, University of Tasmania, Hobart 7001, Tasmania, Australia. Email: nenagh.kemp@utas.edu. au doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2729.2010. 00401.x Editorial