Next week, the commuter armies of Auckland will once again face (increased) travel chaos as New Zealand schools return from the summer break. The prestigious, some would say infamous Auckland Grammar, on my route to NetSafe Towers, is already back and causing me grief.

Ignore my four wheeled battle though and think of the children – 7/8 weeks away from their desks, large chunks of time having been spent with Nintendo DSs, Playstations and mobile phones texting to their mates. What spelling horrors will teachers face in those cute ‘what I did on my summer holiday’ stories they’ll soon be marking?

Texting and txt speak has been blamed in the past for the decline of one of civilisation’s core skills – the ability to spell. If I think back to my school days in the UK I can still sense the fear our class felt when Mr Campbell  would start marking our English exercise books, carefully drawing his ear shaped signs over our grammatical errors. I seem to remember those who really upset him being made to stand in the bin in the corner of the room (that could be a repressed memory though).

Back in 2003 Lynne Truss wrote the book Eat, Shoots & Leaves about her love of punctuation and the proper use of apostrophes amongst other things – she also touched on the decline in standards due to the rise of the web. As a former journalist myself, I like to think I can spell and punctuate correctly but if I’m honest I normally reached for the spellchecker function and used to wait for the sub-editor to do their thing.

You don’t have spellcheck on most mobile phones though and who can be bothered, to be honest, to type in all those vowels anyway? After spending six months learning shorthand to work as a court reporter I found it incredibly easy to move to txt speak which works in the same shorthand manner.

Not everyone finds it so easy as this great opinion piece in The Dominion Post by Linley Boniface explains:

In recent months, however, I’ve realised that being unable to text has long since ceased to be seen as charmingly eccentric and is now widely regarded as just plain weird. In status terms, it’s like not knowing how to tie your shoelaces, or being unable to cut the top off your boiled egg without assistance from a grown-up. Annoyingly, some people continue to send me texts, forcing me to ask my 10-year-old to retrieve them.

So does this digital divide between generations mean the end of English as we know it? Recent studies in Canada and the UK would suggest not – work done at Coventry University suggests that “a child’s level of ‘textism’ could be used to predict their reading ability and ‘phonological awareness’ – the ability to detect, isolate and manipulate patterns of sound in speech.”

Keep this fact in mind if you find yourself reading homework featuring textisms over the next few weeks: “Texting also appears to be a valuable form of contact with written English for many children, which enables them to practice reading and spelling on a daily basis.”

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It’s been several weeks since our last blog post. You may be well up to speed on the upcoming buzziness around the iTablet launch or also discussing the finer points of the Brangelina split (don’t forget to vote on our poll!). I know Christmas is a long time ago now but if you missed our Xmas video be sure to have a watch.