New Zealand students may 'text-speak' in exams (AP/CNN)

[eppur_se_muova]

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) -- New Zealand's high school students will be able to use "text-speak" -- the mobile phone text message language beloved of teenagers -- in national exams this year, officials said.

Text-speak, a second language for thousands of teens, uses abbreviated words and phrases such as "txt" for "text", "lol" for "laughing out loud" or "lots of love," and "CU" for "see you."

The move has already divided students and educators who fear it could damage the English language.
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Confident that those grading papers would understand answers written in text-speak, Haque stressed that in some exams, including English, text abbreviations would be penalized.
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Internet blogger Phil Stevens was not amused by the announcement. "nzqa: u mst b joking," Stevens wrote. "or r u smoking sumthg?"
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more: http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/asiapcf/11/11/nz.text.ap/index.html

It's hard enough to get my students to write clearly without giving them any further excuse to be lazy. This, I hope, will be such a disaster as to utterly invalidate the whole stupid idea.

[lapfog_1]

1. Well, must prepare them for future divorce announcements

from their spouses.

ih8u

[teach1st]

2. OMG

omg, dat iz so kewl. DIS shud mAk tngz so much EZr 4 d kds!

[SoCalDem]

3. will the teachers respond with

f u for the ones who fail:rofl:

[teach1st]

4. Ha!

:wtf:

[Xithras]

5. I already have students who put this sort of thing in their papers.

Many of them are mystified when I ding their grades for it. As I tell them on the first day of class each semester, they write the best papers in the history of mankind, but if those papers are written in Portuguese, Norse, |33+, or Spanish, they can expect a zero. I am not an English teacher and do not expect my student papers to be 100% grammatically and syntactically correct, but I do expect them to be written in English. "|0gI< i5 +43 b0m" doesn't cut it.

Edited to add: I did have a student do a computer security paper on hacker/crackers once that was completely written in |33+. Four pages, doublespaced, on the role of hacker culture and open information structures in developing early Internet security models. I gave him an extra 10 points for originality, and then deducted 5 points for being a 'n00b h4x0r wannabe'. He ended up with the best grade in the class on that assignment :)

[TimeChaser]

6. ... kill me now

Dear gods I *hate* text-speak. Some of my friends use it, but I honestly feel stupider after trying to decode a wall of it.

[jmowreader]

7. I think I see the problem

"Bali Haque," the official who came up with this shit, is "Neil Bush" in Maori.