Chapter 2

REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE AND STUDIES

This chapter presents the literature and studies related to the present

study. The first chapter focuses on the related literature of the problem being

investigated. The second part is about the related studies that were conducted

before by some researchers.

Related Literature

The answer to the question of when language began is still being debated.

However, there are some theories on how human language originated as

mentioned by Akmajian (2010). Language developed when humans began to

mimic sounds of nature and used these sounds as referents for the sources of

the sound. This is referred as the “bow wow theory,” and there is an existence of

onomatopoeic words like bow-wow, meow, crash, and boom. Another theory is

the vocal language. It evolves from the spontaneous cries of pain, pleasure, or

other emotions. Gestural language is also another basis of language evolution

and this involves a system of hand gestures and signals. Other researchers

argued that because of the need of humans to communicate with each other in

completing a task, human language evolved. For these researchers, vocal

language is very important because their work will be finished earlier if they use it

in their communication. This is referred as the functional theory of language.

Furthermore, another theory proposes that the evolution of human language is

linked to the evolution of the human brain. Before, the size of the human brain

was 400 cubic centimeters, but with the evolution of the modern human beings

known as Homo sapiens, the brain was reported to have reached about 1,400

cubic centimeters. With this development, the brain size is considered as a factor

in the evolution of language.

Another hypothesis about the origin of language is based on beliefs.

According to Judeo- Christian beliefs, Adam was given a power to name all

things by the deity. This is also similar to other beliefs throughout the world. For

the Egyptians their god Thoth created speech. For Babylonians, they believed

that their language giver was the god Nabu and for the Hindus, it was Brahma’s

wife, Sarasvati who gave language to them ( Fromkin et al., 2010).

Language, especially English changes over the years and this is evident in

the spelling, grammar and pronunciation. Freeborn (2006) stated that before,

only the people of England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland spoke English

language for four hundred years, but today, English is spoken throughout the

world. It is the native language of about 400 million people in the British Isles,

Canada, the United States of America, Australia and New Zealand. For some

other countries like India and Pakistan and in some African states, it is their

second language as it is used as an official language in education and

government. He also added that there are many different national and regional

varieties of English that have developed and will still continue. These are called

“new Englishes” which have its own characteristics of vocabulary, grammar and
pronunciation. These are present in different states of Africa, India and Pakistan,

Singapore and the Philippines.

There are many changes that the English language has undergone

(Freeborn, 2006). Old English is hard to be understood by Modern English

speakers as there are changes in grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary.

Linguists divided these changes in three major periods of development: the Old

English period (fifth to eleventh centuries), the Middle English period (eleventh to

fifteenth centuries), and the Modern English period (fifteenth century to the

present). In these changes, the four components of language- phonology,

morphology, syntax, and vocabulary undergo three major types of change:

addition, loss, and change in structure.

From Old English times to the present, a great number of new words

which have been added came from French as a result of the Norman invasion.

These include pork, beef, veal, mutton and venison. Mesa, lariat, and taco came

from the Spanish language. From the German, words such as kindergarten,

hamburger, and gesundheit are added. However, there are also words which

have been lost since Old English period and an example of which is wer, “man.”

There is also a semantic change of words and this means an entire group of

words undergoing a parallel semantic changes. Example of this is drawn from the

semantic field of bird names: goose, cuckoo, pigeon, coot and turkey. Each of

these words has a metaphorical use indicating “foolishness.”

 There have been phonological changes between Old English and Modern

English. One of which is the Great Vowel Shift. Ojibwa (2013) describes that The

Great Vowel Shift involved six vowels which were all long, stressed

monophthongs. These vowels in stressed positions were pronounced long and

had a pure sound. The vowel “i” as in “mice” is a high front vowel. In Middle English

mice would have been pronounced as “mees.” Mouse would have been pronounced

“moos,” feet would have been pronounced “fate”, do would have been pronounced as

dough, and “saw” for so.

In morphology, there is an influx of a large number of –able words from

French to English. Examples of this are doable and washable which come from

the Germanic roots do and wash. During the Old English, causative verbs could

be formed by adding the suffix-yan to adjectives like the word redden. However,

this rule has been lost and thus, there would be no words like green-en or blu-en.

Another is, during the Old English, new nouns could be formed by adding –ing to

a large class of nouns. Later on, the rule has changed and it becomes more

restricted in its application so that a much smaller class of nouns can still have –

ing attached.

In syntax, there has been a syntactic rule added to English since the Old

English period. The sentences, John threw out the fish and John threw the fish

out did not occur in Old English. Syntactic distinction between main verbs and

auxiliary verbs did not exist during the Old English period. Examples of this can

be found in Shakespeare’s writings. I deny it not. (I don’t deny it.) Forbid him not. (Do

not forbid him.) Revolt our subjects? (Do our subjects revolt?)
 English language has undergone many changes since the Old English

period and will still continue to change. These changes are evident in the

formation of words and sentence. Some rules are discarded and new rules are

added. Language has never been static, and change is part of the nature of

human language.

Text messaging and Teens

Texting or SMS (short message service) is a method of communication

that sends text messages between cellular phones or from a personal computer

to a cellular phone. It has a limited of 160 characters which could be letters,

numbers, or symbols in the Latin alphabet. SMS concept was developed by

Friedhelm Hillebrand and Bernard Ghilebaert in 1984 through Franco- German

GSM cooperation. The first text message, “Merry Christmas” was sent by a former

developer at Sema Group Telecoms, Neil Papworth to his friend, Richard Jarvis

in 1992. Since there was no keyboard on phones at that time, he typed the

message on a PC and sent it to his friend’s Vodafone (Erickson, 2012).

Text messaging is sent through service providers and instant messaging

is done through internet connection. Teenagers and young adults are using these

two popular forms in their communication (Ling and Baron, 2007). Instant

messaging applications includes Whatsapp, WeChat, Viber, Facebook

Messenger, Skype and among others.

 Oxley (2010) states that “texting is a more relaxed, and colloquial version of

the English language with rare use of grammar, increased use of abbreviations,

and use of emoticons.” With this, it cannot be denied that teens are incorporating

textisms into their academic writing. There is even a debate between scholars,

teachers, parents and students whether or not the use of textism in the

classroom is a positive learning tool.

Texting has been accused as the one which ruins language as Humphrys

(2007) argued, “Texters are vandals who are doing to our language what Genghis Khan

did to his neighbors 800 years ago. They are destroying it, pillaging our

punctuation, savaging our sentences, raping our vocabulary. And they must be

stopped.” For John Sutherland (2002), “Texting is penmanship for illiterates.” This is

because people are not using the correct spelling or even following the standard use

of English language when they are texting.

Teens love texting and prefer it as their major form of communication with

their friends. In an article posted by Center for Innovative Public Health Research

(2015), “three-fourths of the teens from 12-17 years old own cell phones and their

texting surpasses that of young adults.” Girls send around 3,952 text messages a

month while boys send around 2,815 text messages a month. Some teens call,

but many prefer to text. Text messaging becomes their tool in keeping their

messages private.

Texting suddenly becomes so popular because of the unlimited

messaging plans offered by service providers, and this is why texting becomes
part of teenagers’ way of life (Alexander 2010). Teens who have unlimited plans

would just send as many text messages as they can to their friends, and later on,

this would have an effect that their friends would also do the same. Schoenewolf

( 2014) mentioned in his blog that teenagers text during meals, while brushing

their teeth, while they are going to school, during classes, in the cafeteria, before

going to bed, and they sleep with their cell phones or even keeping their phones

near the bed.

Furthermore, Pirillo (2010) cited Amanda Lenhart’s report at Pew that “text

messaging is a way for the teenagers that their friends can reach them at tiny

moments during the day. It allows them to stay constantly in touch with people

who are important to them. Texting is better than calling somebody on a landline

because parents might know what they are discussing all about. There is an

element of ownership in texting.” Moreover, for him, teenagers are more comfortable

communicating through text because they will not feel shy in expressing their

feelings as they “cannot hear their voice or even see their faces.” Teens will even more

likely to settle their issues, arguments or problems through texting.

While almost every teenager is into text messaging, a new language

arises and this is called textism. It refers to the usage of abbreviations in

composing text messages and instant messages. This texting language is often

non-standard that it does not follow the standard rules in writing and spelling.

These include short forms of words, lack of capitalization, omission of vowels,

incorrect spelling, replacement of numbers for words, simplified contractions,

initials , typing letters for homophone words, and miscellaneous abbreviations

(Hering 2001 as cited by Zhang 2015). Students got into confusion as how words

are spelled correctly because of using textism when they text. This texting

language greatly affects English language learning, as formal writing, vocabulary

spelling, grammatical skills and spoken language are concerned (Zhang, 2015).

Texting is a very popular form of communication to teenagers nowadays.

They could do it anytime and anywhere. It allows them to keep in touch with their

friends from time to time. However, texting is being blamed for destroying the

language and affecting the writing performance of the students. Due to these

assumptions, there are many debates on the effects of text messaging to literacy

that took place and some even conducted researches to address this

controversy.

Related Studies

Many researchers have conducted studies on text messaging, instant

messaging, and textism to find out its impact on students’ literacy.

Plester, Wood and Bell (2008) conducted a research on sixty five 11 year

old children and let them translate a text passage from English to textism and

from textism to English. They found out that those who had the highest ratio of

textism to words when translating from English to textism and fewer errors in

translating from textism to English had higher verbal reasoning but there was no
relationship between verbal reasoning and textism translation error. They also

found out that those frequent texters who sent more than three messages a day

scored significantly lower than infrequent texters and non texters on a test of

verbal and non-verbal reasoning.

In instant messaging, Tagliamonte and Dennis (2008) sampled more than

one million words of natural, and unmonitored instant message words from 72

teens between 15 and 20 year olds. In this study, it was found out that only

2.44% of emotional forms occurred in IM; 1.47% were emotional textism like

haha; 0.41% for LOL; 8.6% for u as replacement of you; and 74% for i instead of

I. The decision to make these replacements was a stylistic choice of words

whether or not it was used 100% of the time.

In another study conducted by Plester, Wood and Joshi (2009), they

wanted to find out the impact of textism with eighty-eight 10-12 year olds as they

sent text messages in response to ten scenarios. They found out that girls used

more textism than boy and textism density was positively related to word reading,

vocabulary and phonological awareness. There was a greater use of contractions

(e.g.txt for text), g clippings (e.g. goin for going), symbols (emoticons),

letter/number homophones (e.g. 2nite for tonight), non-conventional spellings

(e.g. fone for phone) and accent stylization (e.g. elp for help) and these were

related to better word reading scores. They concluded that texting does not

contribute to the decline of pre-teen children’s literacy.

 As there were reports that the use of textism in daily electronic

communication has a relation to writing efficiency, Rosen, et. al. (2010)

investigated seven hundred eighteen young adults of how often they use textism,

instant messaging, monthly call minutes, and monthly text messaging. In their

studies, they had two activities, first was the participants wrote formal letter to a

company and the second task was they wrote both formal letter and informal

writing on happiness. They found out that textism use was quite low and

concluded that there was a negative association between reported textism in

daily communications and formal writing but there was a positive association

between textism and informal writing.

Muhammad (2011) studied the effects of text messaging on the spelling

skills of ninth and 12th grade students at US High School in Chicago suburb. He

provided them with a questionnaire concerning their texting practices and a

spelling test appropriate to their level. These participants were asked if it is

appropriate to use textism in formal writings to write a formal email to their

principal. He found out that the use of textism showed no significance on spelling

either for high or low text messaging groups.

Alkawas (2011) study’s sought to discover whether or not Lebanese university

students’ constant use of chatting and textism has in any way affected their

academic essay writing assignments in one English medium university . She

gave questionnaires to students and English instructors regarding behaviors and

practices and beliefs and opinions on texting, and made the students write
academic essays. In her findings, she concluded that texting does not negatively

affect English academic writing. It is because students can differentiate the

appropriateness of using textisms and academic English when it comes to essay

writing.

Grace (2013) conducted a study of one hundred fifty undergraduate

university students in Western Canada and eighty-six in South Eastern Australia.

Her study was focused mainly on supplying naturalistic text messages and to

complete non-word reading and spelling tasks. She concluded that textism use

was negatively correlated with spelling for the Canadian students and for

Australian students but there was an inconsistent evidence for negative

relationship between adults’ use of textism and their literacy skills and these

associations may be influenced by their attitudes towards appropriateness of

textism use.

Mohabir(2013) studied the relationship between text messaging frequency

and the use of text messaging jargon in formal writing. One hundred fifty-two 11-

13 year old secondary school students were studied wherein 68 of them are

males and 84 are females. She found out that participants sent an average of 95

text messages per day with girls averaging about 126 messages per day while

boys had 64 messages per day. She concluded that frequency of text messaging

and instance of jargon in formal writing were not statistically related.

With the studies mentioned above, the present study is different from the

studies conducted by Plester, Wood, and Bell(2008), Muhammad (2011), and

Grace (2013). This is because most of these studies mainly focused on giving

spelling activities for the respondents in determining the impact of text

messaging. Moreover, this study is related to the studies of Tagliamonte and

Dennis (2008), Rosen, et.al. (2010), Plester, Wood, and Joshi (2009), Alkawas

(2011), and Mohabir (2013). This present study gathered authentic data from the

text messages and online group messages like the studies of Tagliamonte and

Dennis (2008) and Rosen et al. (2010) to determine the students’ text messaging

practices. The study also made use of the written outputs of the students like

essays, journal, and free writing. Lastly, this study has more bearing to the study

of Mohabir (2013) in a way that this study sought to determine the significant

relationship between textism, and formal and informal written outputs of the

student
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