Anonymous wrote:I teach 6th grade Language Arts. Their reading comprehension is trash, and their spelling is just as bad. It's the worst I've seen since I started teaching 13 years ago. My students were in 1st grade when the pandemic hit during the 2019-2020 school year.
Their spelling is so bad that auto-correct can't even figure out what word they want. I think a lot of it is due to their use of a lingo and acronyms when texting. They've become so engrained in their brains that they forget and use them during formal writings. The number of times I've had to circle the words "inuff" and "xcept" used in essays is wild. They don't seem to use the 'in' or 'en' on those words when texting, so they've forgotten how to spell them properly (or never learned). One student submitted a book report where he used "nvisable" over and over and over. I asked him to spell invisible for me and he thought it was spelled that way. We cover 350 new spelling words each year and very few of my students are going to be promoted actually knowing these words. It makes me sad.
And if you think the public's lack of being able to use the correct who's/whose and they're/their/there is maddening, wait until you get to see Gen Alpha's use of mint for meant.
Text speak is definitely part of the problem. The spelling isn’t corrected and enforced enough so that can’t switch between the two. This has been showing up at the university level for years now.