Debate over influence of SMS lingo on students
By TEH ENG HOCKTHERE are more than nine million mobile phone users in Malaysia, and the number is rapidly increasing.
Mobile phones have evolved from providing voice communication to a multi-service device. Mobile phones nowadays provide data, graphics, music and more in addition to voice communication.
Mobile telephony networks now indulge in providing information through what they call “value added service” as a marketing strategy to stay competitive in the industry. Thus, it is now possible to check stock quotes, weather reports, and sports updates and much more on your mobile phone.
“We no longer talk about voice going mobile; it’s all kinds of services going mobile,” Nokia Asia-Pacific senior vice-president Robert W. Andersson once said.
However, even with all these new services offered, voice calls and short messaging services (SMS) continue to be the most popular. Usage of SMS to send greetings, invitations, love notes and all other kinds of messages is now widespread. A guy even tried to divorce his wife via SMS.
As a result of its popularity, an entirely new SMS language has evolved, and abbreviations are widely used to cut down on typing time.
Some examples are “LOL” for “laugh out loud”, “b4” for “before” and “gr8” for “great”.
The debate that the use of these abbreviations is contributing to the decline of the English language sounds familiar. It reminds me of the time when academics debated the appropriateness of slang usage in everyday life.
Director-general of Education Datuk Abdul Rafie Mahat recently attributed the drop in students’ performance in last year’s PMR English to the popularity of SMS.
Universiti Malaya English language lecturer associate professor Dr Karen Kow Yip Cheng supported Rafie’s contention that SMS is one of the factors that had caused the drop. She said the results could be seen in the short forms and bad spelling that students had used.
Kow added that the prolonged use of SMS language could develop into a bad habit as SMS spelling became second nature.
“In the long run, you no longer realise that you’ve spelt wrongly,” said Kow, who heads the English Language Department in the university’s Faculty of Language and Linguistics.
Dr Kow also proposed that the Education Ministry conduct a quantitative study on the impact of SMS on languages to understand the matter deeper so that corrective measures can be employed to stop the drop in the standard of English.
She added that it is important to recognise the fact that SMS is a trend and it is not possible to ban or discourage students from using its language.
Instead, she suggested that teachers capitalise on the trend by using short forms and emoticons to raise awareness on incorrect spelling.
“Teachers can print out SMS language and ask their students to rewrite them in proper language,” she said, adding that teachers should be savvy on the use of short forms and emoticons before employing this methodology.
KDU College lecturer Christina Hue, who teaches the Certificate in Intensive English (CIE) programme, also felt the same way, citing that teachers can use different approaches in class to counter the SMS spelling problem.
“For example, they can bring IRC (Internet relay chat) scripts to class for the students to analyse and pinpoint the errors,” Hue said.
She, however, attributed the drop to a lack of interest among the students studying the language.
“The syllabus is too rigid and not interesting,” she said, adding that more current issues that interest students should be incorporated in the syllabus.
Taylor’s College Head of Language Centre Dr Wong Fook Khoon, who has been in the education industry for 40 years, said the decline in the standard of English was not only caused by the widespread use of SMS, but also e-mail and Internet chat programmes such as ICQ.
Dr Wong pointed out that SMS is also widely used by schoolchildren, some as young as 12, who have yet to master English.
She also said that with SMS, the emphasis is on quickness, thus leading to the use of short forms and bad grammar.
“At the end of the day, we sit for exams and we’re tested on our language, not on speed,” she said.
But Universiti Sains Malaysia School of Education TESOL (Teaching English for Speakers of Other Languages) co-ordinator Dr Mohd Jafre Zainol Abidin said that SMS had nothing to do with the drop in the level of English.
“Otherwise, we would have seen the drop over the years, as SMS has already been around for the past few years,” he said.
Dr Jafre added that there was an improvement in the Bahasa Melayu paper in the recent PMR results, despite the fact that there were many students who sent messages in Bahasa Malaysia.
Dr Jafre is against discouraging students’ use of SMS, stating that it was already an improvement that English is being used by the students. “At least they are beginning to use English now,” he said.
To boost the level of English, Dr Jafre recommended that teachers and parents make use of computers, as they encourage students to read more in English. This is because most software and Internet sources are in English.
“To play some computer games, you actually need good comprehension of the language,” he said, citing that his children often go online to search for answers to the games.
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