Mobile phones and Mipoho's prophecy

I chose a PBS article that that discusses how Australian educators are teaching short message service (SMS). Students are learning how to practice with abbreviations common to text messaging. One point that is important from the article is made by Professor John Frow, “English has literary languages of different kinds, it’s got professional jargon, it’s got sub-cultural languages, it’s got dialects…thinking about SMS is actually a way of thinking about English, standard English and about the way it works, the way it’s different from other languages…” The article argues that SMS should be taught in order to teach students the range of language that exists in English. They are teaching this particular form to get students to think about other languages and how SMS can be used to link and move between languages.

I chose this PBS article because it relates to the article by Janet McIntosh. In the town of Malindi, young people use code-switching. When they code-switch, English is the language that is typically abbreviated. English is the language that is always subject to manipulation. Youth in Malindi use abbreviations with English rather than Kiswahili or Kiigiriama. These English abbreviations or SMS are similar to those being taught to the Australian students.  English is the language that can be used to violate rules. Just as the PBS article discusses, English can be used this way because it is different from other languages and can be manipulated in many different ways. The PBS article discusses the global spread of English. Because of this global spread, English is now mixed in with other languages, like Kiswahili and Kigiriama.  A response to the article discusses this new advancement in technology and how we must adapt new skills (learning and using SMS) in order to communicate with one another. 

I believe this article on the teaching of SMS shows how language is a speech play. Similar to the article, “Talking Text and Talking Back: “MY BFF JILL” from Boob Tube to YouTube,” texting and using SMS allows for creative expression and knowledge rather than language decay. The teachers teaching the SMS curriculum have the ideology that SMS should be taught and used by students to enhance their literary skills. However, other people have different ideologies, and think that SMS is keeping students from learning proper English and is not acceptable to teach. In my opinion the PBS article is saying that the use of English SMS is important for everyone. It is important for everyone to learn in order to understand one another. In code-switching, the youth in Malindi show the importance of SMS in English because that is what they use collectively in texts. Only abbreviations are made in English, therefore they must have a collective knowledge on how to use it.http://www.pbs.org/teachers/learning.now/2006/10/do_students_need_to_learn_text.html