"L33T" Speak Invades Schools

Masem writes "NYTimes reports on how common chat room/IM shortcuts (such as 'u' for you, 'r' for are, etc) are creeping into the classroom and homework assignments from those teenage kids that spend a significant amount of time in chat programs. This is giving the teachers headaches in trying to grade the assignments, much less understand them because of the techno-generation gap, and to try to prevent further abuse of the language, have begun penalizing students for using the net slang. Students sometimes don't even realize they use the chat room shorthand until it's pointed out to them, because that method of chatting has become second nature to them."

Comments

I can't say this comes as a surprise

[Raul654]

My HS AP English teacher must have been way ahead of the curve. She instituted an automatic -10% penalty for "egregious" use of the english language. And there was no cap at 0% - as she put it, "yes, you can do so badly on a essay that I will take points off of your previous essays." One poor kid in the grade below me lost 40% in a single sentence (there's just something about using 'a' as a verb) - omg is was the funniest thing I ever saw.

Re:It might be second nature...

[Katravax]

Shakespeare did not write in Middle English. He wrote in modern English. Many of the words he used are now archaic, but it was modern English.

Basic English

[cpeterso]

An interesting "fork" of the English language is Charles Ogden's Basic English . Basic English is like a Esperanto for the real world. Ogden wanted to create a small, consistent, non-redundant subset of the English language that would help foreigners quickly adapt to an English-speaking country. His languages contains just 850 English words of use in everyday conversations. He claims that it takes seven years to learn polished English, seven months to learn Esperanto, and only one month to learn Basic English.

I wish someone would do the same for other languages, such as Spanish. I guess you could just translate the Basic English dictionary to Spanish, but that does not address consistent grammatical rules like Ogden's book did when designing Basic English.