Who do you blame when your child writes messages full of mistakes on Whatsapp and speaks bad Romanian?
Many parents reach, at some point, the following conclusion: “the child speaks and writes poorly in Romanian”. The mistakes they see in assignments, messages received from children on Whatapp (“cf?”, “k”, “bn”) or clumsy wording in compositions alarm them. Who is to blame and what to doasks the website Totuldespremame.
The publication spoke with linguist Corina Popa, doctor of philology, lecturer at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Bucharest and founder of the Grammar School project. She explains how digital communication is changing the way children and teenagers write, how family conversations influence their language, what the boundaries of school are, and what really helps young people learn to think, express themselves and write clearly and accurately.
All About Moms: When a parent says “my child speaks Romanian poorly”, what is actually behind this phrase: a real language problem or an amplified fear of what he sees in writing – in assignments, messages, compositions?
Corina Popa: The answer requires several nuances related to age and context. Many children express themselves coherently orally, have clear ideas and can hold complex conversations, but make spelling or punctuation mistakes in writing. This does not mean that “I speak Romanian badly”, but that writing, a much more cognitively demanding activity than speaking, is still in the process of consolidation. Writing involves simultaneously controlling spelling, syntax, text structure and coherence of ideas. For a child, this is a very complex task, and many of the mistakes that worry parents are actually symptoms of an ongoing learning process.
Between about 10 and 16 years of age, a period of discursive transition frequently occurs. Children have more complex ideas than the linguistic tools they have to express them. The result is a fragmented speech, with many repetitions, with approximate formulations or with frequent appeal to vague, general words such as “stuff”, “things”, “this thing”. It is not a sign of regression, but on the contrary, a sign that thinking is beginning to outgrow the available vocabulary. At this stage, reading and conversations help the most.
All these stages are normal, but there are also situations where children have real difficulties with written and oral expression. The causes can be multiple. Sometimes it's a lack of exposure to rich, nuanced language, especially when children grow up in an environment where conversations are short, predominantly functional (“did you eat?”, “did you do your homework?”). Other times, there is a lack of reading or excessive time spent in digital communication, where language is reduced to short and simplified formulas. There are also situations where the difficulty is related to cognitive development or certain language disorders, in which case specialist interventions are necessary: medical, speech therapy, etc. It is important that parents do not jump to conclusions. If a child makes a mistake in a plural form, it does not mean that he “speaks Romanian poorly”. But when the difficulty of expression is constant and affects both speaking and writing, it is worth analyzing the causes more carefully.
Read more on the Totuldespremame website.
