An Investigation into the Impact of Abbreviated Didactic Texting on Language Learning

This study aimed to investigate whether application of abbreviations in instructional texting (SMS) plays any role in promoting students’ performance in learning English through reducing distance and language anxiety. Parallel with examining elliptical features and abbreviations in creating SMS advertisements for addressing their special customers around the world with informal style, to borrow some of the features for the compass of language teaching, 120 participants in two groups at Isfahan university of technology were presented with the same type of content, namely, English grammar notes. They used directions with different lexemes and grammars. To compare the participants’ grammar learning, ttest was run. Results indicated that the difference between the performance of learners of the groups was statistically significant. Analyses showed that the didactic SMS with abbreviations and elliptical forms was significantly more effective than the SMS without such features in reducing learners’ anxiety, thereby enhancing their language learning. The findings of this study can have implications for both designing texting for advertisements and didactic SMS.