The impact of texting on comprehension

Abstract

This paper presents a study of the effects of texting on English language comprehension. The authors believe that English used in texting causes a lack of comprehension for English speakers, learners, and texters. Wei, Xian-hai and Jiang (2008:3) declare “In Netspeak, there are some newly-created vocabularies, which people cannot comprehend them either from their partial pronunciation or from their figures.” Crystal (2007:23) claims; “variation causes problems of comprehension and acceptability. If you speak or write differently from the way I do, we may fail to understand each other.” In this paper, the authors conducted a questionnaire at Aligarh Muslim University to ninety respondents from five different Faculties and four different levels. To measure respondents’ comprehension of English texting, the authors gave the respondents abbreviations used by texters and asked them to write the full forms of the abbreviations. The authors found that many abbreviations were not understood, which suggested that most of the respondents did not understand and did not use these abbreviations.