What is texting doing to spelling and reading skills?

As an SLP I spend a fair amount of time doing research on strategies for building language and literacy skills.

But back when I was in elementary school, I didn’t catch on to reading right away.

I had what I like to refer to as the Catholic school version of Response to Intervention. I still remember going into the back office with Sister Marie and working on reading in a small group so I could catch up to my peers.

Thankfully the odds were in my favor. I not only had a good education, but I also had an environment that gave me lots of opportunities to practice literacy skills.

My mom perpetually had a massive library of books in the house (and still does to this day). My parents wouldn’t let us get a Nintendo, so when we got bored we were encouraged to pick up a book.

Socializing was different too. When I wanted to send one of my friends a message sometimes I’d write them an actual paper note in class.

Communication, reading, writing, and entertainment were all different then. Free time now is spent on social media and gaming where you can send instant messages to other people. And when you want to socialize, you can simply send your friends a text.

And based on current social rules, those texts often don’t have to be written in a complete sentence with correct grammar and spelling.

With all this technology and “texting”, it makes me wonder if kids are getting enough opportunities to learn solid reading and writing skills.

As a speech-language pathologist, I am especially interested in this topic because most of the kids I’ve worked with already struggle with reading and writing. For those kids, having opportunities to develop literacy is especially important. That’s why I’m always on high-alert, paying attention to how technology is affecting kids (for better or for worse).

At this point it’s hard to tell exactly what the impact is going to be long term when it comes to texting. So far, the evidence has been inconclusive (Chang, 2009; Mittal, 2015; Plester, Wood, Bell, 2008). When you look at reading scores from the National Center of Education Statistics, the 2020 survey only shows a slight decline from 2017 to 2019, but still an improvement compared to the 90s when I was growing up (NCEA, 2020).

There are certainly some benefits to technology, especially for people with disabilities who need certain accessibility features. In some instances, there’s a chance that it could be helping.

Kids with diagnoses like dyslexia or developmental language delays (among others) are at-risk for struggling to read and write, so they need all the “good” practice they can get. Texting definitely gives them practice at “something”. Whether it’s “good” practice is still up for debate in my opinion.

But the reality is that texting is here to stay whether we like it or not.

How can we make sure our kids have opportunities to develop good reading and spelling skills?

If you’re supporting kids with diagnoses that impact their ability to develop literacy skills, the amount of practice they get is crucial to their development.

However, the digital world may make it difficult for kids to get as much practice as they need.

So the question becomes, what do we do about it?

The simple answer: We do the same thing we did before texting was a thing.

And we need to be more diligent about it than ever given all the distractions kids have these days.

The next question: How do we do that?

The tenets of successful literacy intervention

There are a handful of skills students need in order to become successful readers, spellers, and writers as I explain here.

I’m going to break this down with simple terms, but also use some technical terms as well, defining them along the way. If you’re a professional you’ll be able to apply it to your practice; but if you don’t have specific training, you should be able to follow along as well.

When we’re thinking about how to support struggling readers/spellers living in a “txt-spk” world, we want to consider these things:

Structured Intervention
Active and Generative Use
Integration of Skills

1. Structured Intervention

When helping a struggling reader, teaching them the right strategies at the right time is essential.

There are a lot of strategies promoted by popular publishing companies that sound logical, but aren’t designed to help kids develop word attack skills.

Here are a couple of common ones (but these lists of strategies are often pretty long):

Ask an adult for help.

Look at the picture for a clue.

Let me preface this by saying that there is no shame if you have done any of these or if you have ever recommended any of these strategies. These mistakes are super common. However, there is a much better way we can empower kids.

Let me explain why the first two examples don’t typically work. We’ll start with “Ask an adult for help”. While it’s great to teach kids to advocate for themselves, there are no actual reading skills in this strategy. It doesn’t really belong in the category of “What to do when you don’t know the word.” If I’m going to give someone a swimming lesson, I’m not going to tell them to “ask a lifeguard for help”, I’m going to teach them a set of swimming specific skills. Same thing applies with reading.

With the “look at the picture” strategy, this might apply for some basic entry level readers for a few words here and there, but a large portion of the words that kids actually need to learn how to read can’t be easily portrayed with a picture. It’s great to teach kids to look around for the information they need; but in this example we’re teaching kids to look away from the things on the page that are going to help them: the letters and words!

When we’re teaching kids “word attack” strategies, we want them to focus on the information that’s going to help them do that consistently; not things that may only work in a few, unique situations.

So, how do we actually do that? What skills do kids actually need?

The short answer: They need to learn the STRUCTURE and rules for how words are spelled.

When we’re talking about structured literacy intervention, we’re talking about teaching the skills kids need to read and write individual words. In the coming sections, I’m going to talk about 3 of the essential areas we need to address in order to do that: phonology, morphology, orthography.

>>>That’s why I created this toolkit to help build these skills.

Phonology

Phonology is the study of how languages organize their sounds. “Phonemes” are the sound units in language that we perceive. In order to be able to learn to read, kids need to have what’s known as “phonological awareness”.

Common phonological awareness skills include things like rhyming, being able to blend sounds together to form words, or being able to segment sounds in words (e.g., being able to say that the sounds in “bat” are “b…a…t”.). Phonological awareness skills can predict later reading performance, and working on them gives your kids the skills they need to read and spell (Carson, Gillon, Boustead, 2013). In order to be able to make sense of reading and spelling, we have to be able to pay attention to the sounds we’re hearing.

When we’re spelling a word, we need to think about the phonemes in the word in order to be able to pair that with the symbols that represent the sounds in a particular word. This is how we remember how to spell words; and it’s also how we problem solve and figure out how to read words. When we tell kids to “sound it out” as they’re reading or spelling, part of what we want them to do is think about the sounds and the letters, and then figure out what to do with that information.

Our brains are wired for language, but they’re not necessarily wired to learn to read and write. That’s why most people need at least some instruction in order to learn to read, while simply being around people speaking a language is enough for most of us to learn oral language. This is especially true for people who are diagnosed with disabilities that impact their language processing skills (van Kleeck, Gillam, McFadden, 1998).

When we teach kids to read and write, we’re layering ADDITIONAL knowledge on top of the language skills they’ve already started to develop (oral language). Since they’re already producing speech sounds (a.k.a., phonemes), we want to layer reading and writing skills on top of that.

Since I haven’t talked about the “sound it out” strategy yet, I’ll go ahead and do it here.

Telling kids to “sound it out” when they’re struggling is definitely more specific and helpful than saying “just ask an adult or look at the picture”; so we’re at least in the ballpark now because we’re paying attention to the right skills. But we can actually get more specific than that. The mistake that many people make is that they skip right over the phonemes (a.k.a. speech sounds) and go right to focusing on the letters.

When they want to help a child spell a word, they go straight to having kids memorize sequences of letters without teaching them the meaning behind those letters. As a result, kids might be able to copy or reproduce a word during a drill-type activity, but then when they try to spell it later in a different context, like writing a story, they can’t remember how to do it because they have no strategy for recalling the letters in the word.

The way we fix this problem is to make sure to focus on phonological awareness while we’re talking about letters. We can draw attention to the SOUNDS in the word first and THEN start thinking about what letters would go along with those sounds.

For example, if you were spelling the word “bat”, you could say, “Let’s think about the sounds in that word.” And you could help the child along to come up with “b….a….t”. Then once you’ve identified the SOUNDS, you could say those sounds aloud as you are writing the letters. That way the child has a STRATEGY that can be applied to many words, instead of memorizing a string of letters without grasping WHY those letters are sequenced together in the first place.

So instead of saying “sound it out”, take it a step further.

“Let’s think about those sounds. Now let’s think about the letters.”

Morphology

Morphology is the study of the forms of words known as morphemes. There are two types of morphemes: grammatical morphemes and derivational morphemes.

Grammatical morphemes are the grammatical units within words that change the grammatical structure. This includes things like endings on verbs that change the tense (“ed”, “ing”, “s”), or using the “s” to indicate that something is plural or possessive (Bowers, Kirby, & Deacon, 2010).

Derivational morphemes change the word’s class and meaning; and this would include things like prefixes and suffixes. Prefixes like “re” for example can change the meaning of a word, while endings like “ly” or “ment” change the class of a word. For example, “love” changes from a noun or a verb into an adverb when it comes “lovely”, or “ship” changes from a verb to a noun when it becomes “shipment” (Henbest & Apel, 2021).

I provide a ton of examples and further explanations of important morphological skills in my Word Study Toolkit.

Schools are getting better about incorporating phonological awareness into early literacy curriculums; however work on morphology is not done as much as it’s needed. There’s a misconception that it’s a more advanced skill for older students, or that reading skills need to be taught in stages (phonology before morphology, for example).

But recent research shows that this isn’t necessarily true. As early as first grade, kids are able to notice morphemes (like prefixes and suffixes) in words, and use that information to figure out what the word might mean. Additionally, kids who have strong knowledge of morphemes in the early years tend to be better readers in the later grades (Apel & Henbest, 2015; Apel & Lawrence, 2011). It’s also a skill that struggling readers tend to lack through secondary school and even through adulthood (Tighe & Binder, 2015).

By late elementary school, kids are expected to read texts with multimorphemic words, which are words that have more than one morpheme (Nippold, 2016). Phonological awareness and “sounding it out” can be helpful for shorter words with only one morpheme (e.g., cat, bat, hat); but that same strategy doesn’t work as well when you have a word like “recreation” that has four distinct morphemes.

In that case, it would make more sense to help kids pay attention to the four morphemes in the word and break it down that way to “re” “cre” “ate” “ion”. Over time, kids start to realize that sequences of letters like “re” go together for a reason; which makes it much easier for them to problem-solve and read/spell words.

Orthography

Orthography is the study of a spelling system in a language. A lot of people confuse this with handwriting, which is not the same thing. The formation of letters is definitely important, but we also need to pay attention to the meaning behind those symbols and recognize common spelling patterns (Bahr, Silliman, & Berninger, 2020).

The Word Study Toolkit gives some examples of patterns that can help kids learn to spell and read fluently.

Reading and spelling need to be automatic for kids to be good readers and writers. Without automaticity, you’d spend so much time trying to read words that you’d have no capacity left for comprehension of what you’re reading. With writing, you won’t be able to think about the big idea and meaning of what you’re writing if you’re devoting too much energy to “sounding words out”.

That’s why studying orthography, along with phonology and morphology, is so important. When you’re studying morphology by looking at the parts of words (like affixes, root words, grammatical endings) talking about how they’re spelled, you’re also studying orthography. When you’re doing phonological awareness exercises and also talking about the letters that go with the sounds, you’re also studying orthography.

You’re also studying orthography when you’re studying homophones like “are” and “our” or “steak and “stake” or when you’re studying spelling patterns like “ought” or “augh”. One of the biggest inaccuracies in spelling curriculums is that they refer to these more difficult spelling patterns as “exceptions” to the rule because they don’t have a 1:1 correspondence between letters and sounds. This is never the case.

There is ALWAYS a pattern and reason why a word is spelled the way that it is. It does our kids a disservice if we tell them it “doesn’t follow the rules and they just have to memorize it”. If your child is struggling to spell, they WON’T simply memorize it (Bahr et al., 2020).

Kids don’t have to learn every single spelling pattern in order to be proficient readers and writers. However, if we explain that they need to look for these patterns and point them out to our kids, they’re way more likely to catch on to the different patterns independently (Fallon & Katz, 2020).

I think some people assume that it’s easier to brush off more difficult spellings as “exceptions” because they think that kids won’t understand the rule. Sometimes people explain it this way because they don’t know the answer themselves; however a simple Google search is often enough to look up a spelling pattern so you can explain it to a child.

Let’s give our kids the benefit of the doubt and tell them the truth. They just might be able to understand it.

2. Active and Generative Use

We get stronger with skills when we use them actively instead of passively. Kind of like how you can’t learn to drive by simply sitting in the passenger seat; at some point you have to get behind the wheel. This is referred to as “active” use.

When we use skills in “generative” ways, we’re taking a skill or concept and applying it across different situations and contexts (Walsh & Blewitt, 2006). For example, you might learn that you can use a certain letter to spell one word; but since you’ve developed an understanding of what that letter represents, you can also figure out how to use it in other words.

Working on skills like phonological, morphological, and orthographic knowledge form the foundation for structured literacy intervention (Henbest & Apel, 2021). However, in order to be proficient, kids need regular opportunities to have this “active and generative” use.

A lot of kids do just fine with the standard reading curriculum delivered in most schools; even with the influx of screentime and “txt-spk”.

However, some kids need things to be more intensive and direct; especially if they have diagnoses that impact learning. Even though school curriculums do involve a lot of structured teaching strategies, a lot of skills need to be learned implicitly.

In other words, instead of someone sitting down and explaining the skill directly, kids have to figure it out on their own as they’re practicing other skills. For example, as they’re reading, they might pick up on the meanings of vocabulary words or the spellings of words they’re encountering for the first time.

Also, when they’re writing, kids have to remember how to spell words, formulate sentences with different vocabulary, and problem-solve to figure out how to spell words they might not have learned before. It challenges them to apply the skills they’ve been learning; but in this struggle those skills become stronger. The average elementary school student learns thousands of new words each year, and a lot of it happens during these challenging reading/writing tasks (Kucan, 2012).

Kids are learning things implicitly all day long; which is a good thing because there’s no way teachers could cover every single skill kids need to know.

Unfortunately, when a student has a diagnosis such as dyslexia, it’s much harder for them to pick up on language skills implicitly (like phonological, morphological, or orthographic information). They also need much more structured instruction before they are able to be independent with “active” and “generative” use (Bahr et al., 2020). This means they often need assistance transitioning to more difficult application tasks. For example, instead of learning how to spell a word and immediately being able to use it while writing an essay, they might need additional practice using the spelling pattern one word at a time or in individual sentences.

However, once kids DO start to grasp on to literacy concepts, having LOTS of opportunities to practice is essential for retaining the skills.

Think of it like a muscle that gets stronger after being flexed repeatedly. With technology, we just have to make sure that kids are “flexing” the right muscles. With phonology and orthography, there is some potential to practice these skills, even if you’re using a device. Where it gets a bit dicey is when you have things like spell-check and autocorrect.

When you are spelling a word with a pen and paper, there isn’t any device to generate the rest of the word for you once you’ve written the first few letters. Instead, you have to think about the sounds in the word, think about the written symbols, and then generate them. It requires a lot more effort and attention and is way more “active and generative”.

As you practice spelling and reading over time it no longer feels like hard work because your brain just processes the written symbols and makes sense of them automatically.

When teachers give kids “sight words” this is essentially what’s happening. Your brain has gone through the process of thinking through the letters and sounds so many times for that particular word that you can process the written symbols, pair them to relevant sounds, put them all together, and collectively recognize it as a word that means something.

All of that happens very quickly because our brains are pretty amazing. It only seems like we’ve “memorized” it because the process has become so fluid that it only SEEMS that way. This is what needs to happen in order for us to have automaticity with reading and spelling.

But limited opportunities means less automaticity, and using technology like texting can limit the opportunities kids have to practice foundational spelling skills.

When you’re texting “are” can turn in to “R”, so will kids know the difference between “our” and “are” when they actually have to spell and read them?

When it comes to morphology, the same issue can come up. You do technically have the opportunity to use these skills; but the rules get a bit fuzzy. You can skirt around them and avoid truly using the morphological skills you might need to read a text or write a paper. Or write a professional email for that matter.

For example, in the word “because” there are two morphemes. “Be” and “cause”. Both of those things are extremely valuable for kids to know because both of them can be used in other words as well. If a child knows how to spell “cause” in the word “because”, they can remember how to spell that word part in other words as well.

But what if they’ve been spending the majority of their time texting, and they’ve been saying “cuz”? Not only have they eliminated part of the word; they’ve replaced the remaining part with something that isn’t useful in any other context.

Kids who naturally catch on to language skills can often transition from “text” spellings and true spellings. They also might have had enough practice with the skills that they’ve solidified them and don’t need additional opportunities to use them. But for kids who struggle, making this transition and might be more difficult (Fallon & Katz, 2020). That’s why they often need extra practice with key foundational skills like I describe here.

3. Integration of Skills

With phonological, morphological, and orthographic skills, you’re never truly working on just ONE of the skills at time. The same goes for language and vocabulary skills in general. They all impact each other and you can’t really isolate them.

For example, when you’re talking about morphology, you also have to think about how words are spelled, so you’re also working on orthography. Or when you think about how to spell a word part when you’re focusing on morphology, you also have to think about the individual letters and sounds; so you’re still focusing on orthography and phonology at the same time (Kucan, 2012).

However, this “integration” doesn’t happen in the same way across contexts. For example, you have to integrate a different set of skills when writing versus typing. For writing, you have to use letter formation skills; while for typing, you’d use keyboarding skills.

With devices there are a ton of accessibility features that have opened up a lot of opportunities for people with disabilities. For example, texting makes communication accessible for the Deaf. Text-to-speech features allow text to be read to people who’d rather listen. We can also use voice dictation for messages, which means that you can bypass spelling and typing all-together.

These are all good things because they make it possible to connect in new ways. One of the best inventions (in my opinion) is the audiobook. Audiobooks not only make it possible for us to listen to books while we do other things (driving, walking, making dinner), but they also make it possible for struggling readers to listen to books independently that might be above their reading level. This can expose them to language skills they might not have otherwise encountered.

With texting (and devices in general), we have things like autocorrect and word prediction. On one hand, it can increase typing speed. On other hand, we might not have the chance to really think about the way a word is spelled. This takes away part of the “active” component we’d normally use to spell a word when physically writing, so we don’t have to fully integrate skills in the same way we would if writing without those features.

When you factor in the informal grammar rules with texting and the abbreviations, we don’t get the same level of integration with morphology either.

The other concern with devices (phones in particular) is that most applications have features that are designed to be addictive. That means that it’s easy to pick up your phone with the intention of sending a quick text to a friend; but get sucked in to a rabbit hole of notifications.

This might end up taking time away from opportunities to do other, more productive things. Like having REAL human interactions or spending your free time reading a book. It’s possible that excessive screen time is more harmful that all the texting.

In conclusion

So, where does this leave us? The takeaway is that whether kids are texting or not (which they likely ARE), we need to make sure they have opportunities to develop foundational literacy skills.

Here is where most people want to know where to get started and next steps. That’s why I created the Word Study Toolkit for SLPs. I originally designed it for SLPs providing language therapy (and it’s perfect for that!), but I’ve had parents and teachers find it useful as well).

When I mentor SLPs, the component that I often emphasize the most is morphology-because it’s often not addressed with enough intensity in a lot of reading curriculums. I also emphasize orthography because it’s so closely related (and also overlooked). In the Word Study Toolkit, I give you the nuts and bolts you need to start working on both of these areas with your kids.

When people start to realize how important these skills are, they usually want some type of complicated curriculum or hierarchy. The truth is, there is no one “perfect” order to start working on morphology. All you need is a few simple protocols like this one and a list of different morphemes to cycle through. That’s also why this toolkit can be used for students as young as early elementary school all the way through high school. For the younger kids you can start with just a few, more common patterns in the toolkit.

However, you’ll find that a lot of older kids still need practice with these skills; and since it’s such a comprehensive resource; you’ll be able to find patterns appropriate for them as well.

Here’s what’s inside the Word Study Toolkit: