Abstract:

Short message service (SMS) has being found to be prevalent in students’ academic writing. One of the challenges facing English teachers of first year university students is their inability to differentiate between the standard and non-standard language in academic writing. This challenge is manifest in the student’s assignments, essays, tests and exams, where Standard English should be used. The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyse deviations between the structure of SMS forms and that of Standard English used by students in academic writing, with the purpose of highlighting prevalent use of the SMS language. The research was empirical in nature, since it involved the use of both primary (refers to information retrieved from students’ written information in the classroom situation) and secondary (refers to information retrieved from questionnaires where participants wrote ten sentences on anything, and cellular phone inboxes of the subject which indicated their natural use of the SMS language outside the classroom situation) sources of information. The aim of employing multiple sources of data collection was to ensure that a theory was tested, using more than one variable, to help in establishing the validity and reliability of the findings. The research used both qualitative and quantitative approaches. A qualitative method was identified as the most suitable method to describe the students’ use of SMS language in the classroom setting, and a quantitative method was adopted to gather demographic information, and to quantify SMS forms used in the students’ essays, questionnaire corpus, and cellular phone inboxes, using four sources of data collection, viz. student essays (n48), questionnaires (n273), cellular phone inboxes (n78) and lecturer interviews (n8). The research provided evidence that, contrary to the researcher’s initial beliefs, that there is a high level of SMS language that interferes with students’ English academic writing, there was a low frequency of SMS forms (viz. the total word count). However, the findings revealed that the SMS forms contributed to vowel and consonant reduction, and substitution. Although the research showed evidence of minimal SMS forms in the students’ academic writing, there is still a need to conscientious students’ about the use of SMS language in academic writing.

Keywords:

Short message service (SMS), structure, deviations, Standard English, academic writing.