Pre-service Teachers’ perceptions on instant messaging and orthographic competence

Abstract

This work examines the perception held by pre-service teachers of Spanish in Chile and Argentina of the digital written norm in IM, together with their opinion regarding the influence of textisms on secondary students’ acquisition of orthographic competence. The study uses a transactional approach based on surveys and uses and applies a descriptive non-experimental design. Results, when compared with studies for the European Spanish variant, showed that pre-service teachers in Chile and Argentina considered use of textisms as harmful to secondary students’ development of orthographic competence, despite their own frequent use of textisms. However, one of the main findings is a certain degree of tolerance of specific types of textisms in digital writing, as was a more integrative approach to those written variables on the part of participants in Argentina.