IM lingo and Standard English

Earlier this week, I posted briefly about a project in which a researcher investigated college students' abilities to understand ideas presented in Standard English vs. text/IM lingo. The idea deserves a more detailed treatment for this audience:

The project began with the observation by a teacher educator that students were having a difficult time passing the Praxis I test as well as the exams he gave in his courses. As part of a course in critical reading, students reported they found it difficult to follow the longer passages they were required to read on those tests. Also, they found that they frequently read the beginning of the questions, and immediately proceeded to answer the question, but found they had missed details that were presented later in the question.

Intrigued by this, the researcher divided sections of his course into two groups. Each was given the identical test, except one group was given the questions in Standard English and the other was given the test in which the Standard English questions had been translated into IM/txt lingo using a translator (such as this one... http://transl8it.com/).

In this limited study (the data came form only two section of the course at his university), the group that took the test in IM/txt lingo earned statistically higher scores on the test.

This points to several interesting questions...

• Are our students effectively bilingual?
• Can educators facilitate students learning new information by presenting it in IM/txt lingo?
• Are these tests biased? alternatively... Are these tests designed to cull students with deficient skill in Standard English?

To me one of the important lessons we can take form this is that educators must help students understand the settings in which they are communicating and realize that they must have skill in different types of communication for their 21st century lives. Sure, they might value certain types of communication over others (we can identify those they don't value as middle school students label them "stupid"), but a gateway to certain communities is competence with accepted communication standards. I suggest the term "situational communication" to describe this idea.

While many adults may bemoan this as a sign of the cognitive decline of our students and society, educators must recognize this as a characteristic of our students today, and we must develop strategies for adapting our curriculum and instruction so that our students become competent in many communication communities.