Text messaging can have a positive impact on students, especially teenagers, in the classroom, because they learn and improve skills in different areas such as literacy. Many individuals will automatically assume students' learning skills are declining in areas such as spelling and writing due to the overuse of text messaging slang, but little evidence validates that belief. To support this, a study was conducted were a group of students were given a handset to engage in text messaging over ten weeks while the other group did not receive the handset. According to Graeme Paton, the group that received the handset, showed the correlation between spelling and text messaging which resulted in a "highly phonetic nature" from the abbreviations used. Also, textism encouraged the students to partake in writing outside of school which fosters their writing skills. Ahmed Al Shlowiy mentioned in his article how text messaging can be an important concept among teenagers because it involves the consistency of writing and when one writes frequently they are improving their writing skills. These two articles show similar characteristics for motivation towards enhancing teenagers and young adults' writing skills and abilities. Writing is something most individuals need to practice on a regular basis in order to develop and build strength with it. Text messaging has this ability to do so because individuals are constantly writing out different words to one another even if it is through abbreviations and slang.
Not only can text messaging encourage teenagers and young adults to participate in writing outside of the classroom, but it can improve their spelling and grammar skills as well. Claire Carter stated that abbreviations from the use of text messaging requires teenagers to sound out the word in order to form the correct abbreviations they want to use. Sounding out the words/abbreviations will help the individuals in the future by learning and writing new words. In situations where individuals are unaware of a word, or if it is a brand new word to them, they will use their abilities to sound out each letter to form the correct sound of the entire word. This brings in the idea that text messaging can relate to phonetics and is phonetically based because of the fact that individuals are sounding out each letter. Individuals are recognizing the skills they have already learned regarding phonetics and finding the correlation between how the words sound and how they are written. Magdeline Lum stated, the teenagers and young adults that are currently in school will bring together their knowledge of written and spoken language. This correlates with the sounding out of unknown words that individuals do because they are bringing the skills they learned in the classroom into their everyday lives.
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