English Essay

Are social media and text messaging negatively impacting high school students?

By Ryan Little

The way students communicate with one another through social media and text messaging is creeping into high school classrooms across the country.

Slang terms and text-speak such as IDK (I don't know), SMH (shaking my head), and BTW (by the way) have become a common sight on student assignments, befuddling some high school teachers who are unsure how to fix this growing problem.

Terry Wood, a foreign language teacher at St. Mary's Ryken High School in Leonardtown, Md., has seen a "dramatic decline" in the writing abilities of her students "due to Tweeting, Facebook, and texting."

"They do not capitalize words or use punctuation anymore," Wood, a teacher with 10 years of in-class experience, says. "Even in E-mails to teachers or [on] writing assignments, any word longer than one syllable is now abbreviated to one."

While advocates of slang words may say this trend is simply an evolution of language, Chad Dion Lassiter, professor of race relations at the University of Pennsylvania, considers it "a dumbing down of culture." Lassiter leads an academic mentorship program for high school students in the Philadelphia area and has observed "this broken level of communication."

"We're looking at some of these writing skills and what I'm noticing is [that] there is miscommunication due to the fact that their communication is so limited," he says. "The problem is the adults. We have to train adults to work with young people and hold them accountable."

While slang terms may be most prevalent in the high school classroom, Lassiter notes that colleges are "getting [admissions] essays like they've never seen before."

Where some admissions officers have observed a shift in language used in admissions materials, Martha Allman, dean of admissions at Wake Forest University, says she has not "seen the shortcuts that you typically see in social communication."

There is a measure of uncertainty as to whether college admissions officials will adapt to this social change in language, or if future prospective college students will need to be mindful and observant of the words they use. Ananda Mitra, professor and chair of the department of communication at Wake Forest, believes colleges will continue to place the responsibility on students to conform during the admissions process.

"Education is about adaptation to some degree," Mitra notes. "An intelligent, educated student coming out of high school should be adaptive. Those who do not adapt would [not be admitted]."

While college officials' stance on slang remains the status quo, the future is unclear as more generations of students grow up with technology that embraces slang.