OMG! TXT MSG turns 15!

Cell phone-accessorized teens may think that's just GR8. But as the lexicon spawned by a 160-character message limit starts to spill off the cell phone screen into written work, some of their English teachers aren't exactly ROFL. Nor does seeing text abbreviations crop up in essays bring a smiley face to college admission officers.

The British-based Mobile Data Association dates text messaging to December 1992, when a British engineer sent the message "Merry Christmas" to a colleague from a computer to a mobile handset. And data from CTIA, the Wireless Association, show that texting is still in a growth spurt: 158.6 billion text messages were sent in the U.S. in 2006, up from 81 billion the year before.

No large academic studies have confirmed it, but anecdotally, you can see text-speak creeping into students' writing, says Kathleen Blake Yancey, Florida State University English professor and president-elect of the National Council of Teachers of English.

"There are some teachers who are not happy to see LOL in the middle of a paper," she says.

Last year, veteran high school English teacher Ruth Maenpaa started noticing how much text messaging was affecting her students, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. The first time Maenpaa flagged the use of "4" for "for" in an essay, the student said she was so used to text-messaging that she didn't even think about it.

"As I watch students texting, I see them routinely using abbreviations to the point that they do not know how to spell the word correctly," she writes in an e-mail.

Maenpaa, who retired in the spring after spending the last half of her 34-year teaching career at her alma mater, Skyview Senior High in Thornton, Colo., also saw the brevity demanded by text messaging affecting students' syntax, organization and other technical-writing skills. She adjusted her lessons to do more formal review of punctuation and paragraphing. She also used texting as an opening to discuss audience, purpose and genre to get students to see that texting is a different language, one not appropriate for formal writing.

The walls between the school and the cell phone or computer screen are permeable, and the key is to get students thinking about language so it's used intentionally and effectively in context, says Florida State's Yancey. "Language users will take a practice from one setting and take it to another. That's the nature of language. What I really hope is that people will translate appropriately."

It's like flip-flops, she says. "There's nothing wrong with flip-flops, worn at the appropriate time in an appropriate way. But soccer players don't wear flip-flops in a game."

To some extent, context is self-enforcing, like a beauty queen learning the hard way what not to post on Facebook or MySpace, she says. "Where there's a practice that's terrifically egregious, it gets pounded on right away."

Young people don't always know what is appropriate, but there are still standards, Yancey says. On college applications, standards are enforced by those who admit students, for example.

And texting jargon isn't appropriate in application essays unless it's relevant to the topic, says Douglas Christiansen, associate provost for enrollment at Vanderbilt University, who has worked in college admissions for two decades. "We've seen it increase, but not too much."

Still, Maenpaa worries more about some of the subtle but deeper aspects of text-speak. Texting relies on brevity, simple word choice and sentence fragments, and she sees more teenagers struggle to compose essays of any length with cohesive logic. She sees texting, and the ubiquitous screen-based communication it embodies, as ultimately affecting students' intellectual endurance.

"Texting offers immediate gratification, but learning is hard work," she writes. "A generation of students who are content with five-minute research sessions on the Internet and communication based on sound bites will definitely struggle with abstract concepts and commitment as they encounter more rigorous educational environments and the expectations of demanding employers."

A SAMPLING OF TERMS:

4: for

4COL: For crying out loud

ATSL: Along the same line

BTW: By the way

G/F: Girlfriend

G2CU: Good to see you

GR8: Great

IDTS: I don't think so

IRMC: I rest my case

LOL: Laughing out loud

NBD: No big deal

NOYB: None of your business

OTTOMH: Off the top of my head

RME: Rolling my eyes

ROFL: Rolling on floor laughing

TMI: Too much information

TSTB: The sooner the better

U: you

UR: Your, you're

WITW: What in the world?

Source: www.webopedia.com/quick_ref/textmessageabbreviations.asp