Grammatical understanding, literacy and text messaging in school children and undergraduate students: a concurrent analysis

Recent research has demonstrated that use of texting slang when text messaging does not appear to impact negatively on children and young people's literacy and may even benefit children's spelling attainment. However, less attention has been paid to the impact of text messaging on children's and young people's understanding of grammatical forms. This study examined the interrelationships between 243 children and undergraduate students' grammatical violations made when text messaging and their performance on assessments of spoken and written grammatical understanding, orthographic processing and conventional spelling ability. The children were found to make significantly more capitalisation and punctuation errors, and to use unconventional punctuation more frequently that the adults, when the length of their messages was taken into account. For the primary and secondary school children there was no relationship between the tendency to make grammatical violations when texting and their understanding of conventional grammar or orthography. For the young adult sample, there was some evidence of an association between the tendency to make capitalisation and punctuation errors when texting, and poorer performance in selecting the grammatically correct orthographic representation of a pseudoword. This relationship remained after controlling for individual differences in undergraduates' IQ and spelling ability. Overall, there is little evidence that ungrammatical texting behaviour is linked to grammatical understanding or knowledge of orthographic representations of language in children. However, there is some evidence that young adults' violation of grammatical conventions when texting may be linked to limited understanding of grammatically-related orthographic conventions

'When I click "ok" I become Sassy – I become a girl.' Young people and gender identity: Subverting the ‘body’ in massively multi-player online role-playing games

This article is available open access through the publisher’s website through the link below. Copyright @ 2012 Taylor & Francis.This article explores young people's practices in the virtual spaces of online gaming communities. Based on a five-year ethnographic study of virtual worlds, it considers how young people construct and maintain identities within virtual social systems. In particular, the article discusses digital gender practices and considers the potential that these games offer for their young users to engage in alternate gender identities. We argue that these digital spaces offer spaces for the imagination and can enhance agency and, potentially, resistance. However, digital identity is simultaneously no ‘liberated space’ and it incorporates norms and practices that often mirror those of the material world. We argue that this ‘porosity’ is an important tool through which young people come to understand gender identity

Media pluralism: What matters for governance and regulation?

Media pluralism is valued in most jurisdictions because it contributes to a well-informed citizenry. The authors examine what media policy and regulatory levers appear to affect five types of citizen knowledge across the European Union. They conclude that concentration of titles matters more than ownership in newsprint; and that neither type of concentration matters in broadcasting in the same way, but the regulatory regime for public service broadcasting does, particularly for political knowledge

Digital switchover in Europe

This article discusses the political, economic, technological and human aspects of the digital switchover in Europe and explores various policies for managing the process. The article first examines the advantages and drawbacks of digital switchover, and identifies a number of challenges and policy dilemmas of making switchover an achievable objective. It goes on to look at digital television adoption across Europe and assesses the effectiveness of free-to-air digital television to accelerate take-up. Finally, the article examines EU initiatives as well as national plans in digital switchover and proposes various measures for encouraging the take-up of digital services and therefore bringing forward the likely idea of analogue switch-off

Peering over the shoulders of giants?

‘Open’ is a highly-visible cultural trend of the early twenty-first century. A brief scan of anewspaper or quick Internet search reveals it as a prefix to learning, source, standard, data,knowledge, democracy, access, repository, innovation, government, science and probablymore. The expectations of the broadband generation – young people born around the turn ofthe century – for openness and instant, on‑demand access to information affect research asmuch as any other social activity. As the world’s population of digital residents – those whosee the Web as the place where they express opinions, form relationships, develop an identityand belong to a community – grows, the expectation that the Web will be the place whereinformation is created and communicated will grow alongside them