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I am twenty-seven years old. I don't use Facebook, I don't text, and I don't blog. But maybe I should. Many of my friends in high school were logged onto AOL Instant Messenger, still more of my friends in college used electronic communities and messaging to communicate with each other. Somehow, the communications revolution passed me by.

Now, I teach high school English, and I am struck not only by how swiftly this shift in technology has taken hold, but by how widely it has been adopted by the generation now enrolled in our secondary schools.

Not a day goes by that I don't fight the futile battle to rid the classroom of cellular phones. When students are slow to begin an assignment, I will sometimes say jokingly, "Maybe you could just text me a copy of your response" About a third of the students I proposition try to take me up on the offer.

This, of course, brings us to the topic of discussion: the electronic revolution and the death of the English language. Or at least, that is the tenor of many English teachers who might also try to place the internet as a cause of Rome's fall.

In all seriousness, there the popularity of electronic communication has weakened student writing. As students default to texting, IMing, or posting to a social networking site for their primary communication outlet, formal considerations are often the first casualty in a race to convey as great a quantity of information in as few keystrokes as possible. When students reach the classroom, they find themselves in yet another situation where (they believe) success is measured by the sheer quantity of information related. Accordingly, they fall back on their "go to" plan for such situations and substitute numbers for words, use cryptic acronyms, and let spelling go altogether.

I would argue, however, that though these effects on student writing are substantially negative, they are also limited to the written word. Non-standard spoken English also has a negative impact on writing, as students "write how they talk," strewing their paper with mistakes in subject-verb agreement and homophones; we teachers recognize this problem, and immediately have premonitions of the hours spent after school "unteaching" these ungrammatical constructions.

Electronic slang, though, seems to be more of a "meta-skill." Students know they are doing it. The problem is not in the student's grammar (the one in their head), but in her understanding of audience, that staple of the writing process.

Students are accustomed to an audience of their peers and therefore default to electronic slang. Teachers must focus on conveying the importance of audience to their students so that students gain an awareness of the many voices they have to choose from (I try to encourage students to develop a special "teacher" voice for more formal writing situations).

Kids are remarkably intelligent. It isn't that they are somehow handicapped by the emergence of electronic communication. Rather, they just haven't been taught to control their selection of language. If you have ever text messaged, you quickly learn why students use electronic slang (I also learned why fleshy thumbs will be bred out of the population). The IM language of today's high school students certainly has its place. The challenge is to relate to students that this place just isn't in the classroom.

Learn more about this author, Michael Dermott.
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