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Do Your Kids Still Know How to Spell?

by Jayvee on July 11th, 2007

“We’ve already lost one generation.”

These were the striking words coming from Mr. James Young, Senior Marketing Manager of Tegic Communications. Tegic is more popularly known as the company behind the T9 “predictive text” input that we find in almost all our phones today.

A campaign is being launched in the South East Asia region to address the alarming rate of elementary school kids who have succumbed to the pangs of “text speak.” Abbreviated words like “tnx”, “go der” or “w8″ have been appearing in elementary school essays and the worst thing about it is that a good number of these children don’t see anything wrong with it.

I come from a traditional elementary school that set high standards for studying the classics, Romance literature as well as imposing hours and hours of training in penmanship and grammar class. We were also subject to four years of Latin when I went to high school.

As an Education graduate (I am also a teacher by degree), I can see the growing concern in Asia, particularly the Philippines, for children who grew up not knowing what a pulse dial telephone is - and base most of their communication through mobile phone use.

Mr. Young, on behalf of T9 is pushing an ongoing campaign that promotes the use of T9 which is the easiest way to help kids acquire better spelling habits without removing them from technology. Of course, as a company, I would see the vested interest of the T9 group in this endeavor, but their campaign also does make sense.

The Philippines has been considered to be four years advanced when it comes to mobile phone services. The SMS hype started back in 2002 and is quickly gaining ground in the West (from the many movies I now see with kids text messaging). Will the US become subject to the same problems in mobile phone culture adaptivity?

Here are definitely some points to ponder on:

1. How early should your children own cellphones? Although I am not a parent, I’m going to be a devil’s advocate for a bit and rationalize that mobile technology does have its humongous benefits and that the coming of the mobile phone was timely for us at an age where we already were subject to rigorous grammar and spelling classes. Our kids, “the lost generation” (aptly called Generation TXT by many of us here in the Philippines) are thrown into the technology cage sooner than they could ever expect.

2. Should you allow cellphones in school? Schools are slowly starting to allow mobile phones into the classroom. According to Young, they should be allowed in the same way that the scientific calculator was allowed. Teachers should encourage children not to stray from the comfort zone of owning a mobile phone, but rather encourage them to use the built in predictive text input method so that, by repetition, they will be able to spell better.

3. Is the problem really the cellphone or is it something even bigger? In the same way that the home is the extension of the school, I feel that parents should be more active in helping their children become more competent in certain “life skills” such as spelling, cleaning behind the ears, and saying please. If I were a parent, I would not deny the use of mobile phones as these are already too inculcated into our lives.

Ever since I owned my first phone, I was introduced to the predictive text input method in the Nokia 3210. I actually found it easier and much faster to compose long and short messages with fewer keystrokes than by the traditional keypad entry. I guess the reinforcement here would be to help kids maintain good spelling habits by at least giving them a phone that will encourage them to spell right - like a QWERTY thumbboard Treo.

Is the situation I’ve written about a true concern or is it hyped? I’d love to hear from the readers.

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