Texting in School Class

Texting in class usually gets kids in trouble. But some writing instructors, intrigued by the popularity of cell-phone novels in Japan, are considering phone composition as a way to get students interested in literature.

"Some critics argue that mobile phone novels are not literature," says Yukiko Nishimura, a linguist and professor of humanities at Toyo Gakuen University in Japan. "I think they are -- it's a new genre."

Nishimura has shown that Japanese cell-phone novels and popular print novels are similar in the sophistication of language that they employ. She found that cell-phone novels are written at a sixth- to eighth-grade level, while print novels are written at a fifth- to ninth-grade reading level.

Cell-phone novelists compose with their thumbs on their iPhones or Nokias, then upload their words to a Web site. Readers download the stories in short installments and read them on their phone screens. The phenomenon started almost a decade ago in Japan, where cell-phone stories, called keitai shousetsu, have been converted to best-selling novels and blockbuster movies. The trend has since spread to other Asian countries and is beginning to emerge in the United States.

Posted to the site on 18th June 2009