Well it has been made official once it hits CNN I guess… The Kiwi’s have just allowed students to use IM/TXT speak in official school essays. The position is that while traditional written English is preferable they will accept work from students in IM/TXT speech as long as the work is thoughtful and articulate. I would be interested to hear folks thoughts on this but I am actually thinking that this is quite a brave step by any education department. Well done to this department for recognising the world that their students live in and the relevance of the way students of today communicate with one another. However, I do have a problem with allowing the students to use IM speak in more formal settings that will always call for a more traditional written genre. Personally, while I congratulate them for having the guts to go ahead with such a move, I believe we need to be teaching students genre and audience. When they have an understanding of that they can begin to realise what is appropriate and not appropriate forms of communication in different situations. Students need to learn that IM speak is only appropriate for particular audience. Furthermore, they have to be able to critically anaylse the appropriate audiences for themselves.
IM speak and TXT speak is just an amazing language that has evolved some incredibly. Let’s encourage students to use it at appropriate times to appropriate audience. The links to this story in different forms can be found below…..
The CNN article…. http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/asiapcf/11/11/nz.text.ap/index.html
My Digg submission… http://digg.com/world_news/OMG_The_End_of_English/
Look forward to some comments
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Brett, I recently posted on this story and included a 2 minute excerpt of David Warlick speaking on this topic as well as another link from Gary Stager.
http://tinyurl.com/tkybj
Thanks Dean I will have a look at that tonight…. Actually I met Dave Warlick via a question on this very topic almost 2 years ago.