American Journal Of Philological Sciences
44
https://theusajournals.com/index.php/ajps
VOLUME
Vol.05 Issue04 2025
PAGE NO.
44-47
10.37547/ajps/Volume05Issue04-12
Methology For Developing Students Reading
Comprehension Skills Based on The Interpretation of
Social Abbreviations in English
Shodiev Jakhongir Yusuf ogli
A first-year doctoral (PhD) student at Tashkent state pedagogical university, Uzbekistan
Received:
12 February 2025;
Accepted:
13 March 2025;
Published:
10 April 2025
Abstract:
In the digital age, social media and informal communication have introduced a wide range of
abbreviations into the English language. These abbreviations, often used in text messaging, online chats, and
social networks, pose both challenges and opportunities for language learners. This article discusses a
methodological approach to enhancing stude
nts’ reading comprehension skills through the interpretation of
English social abbreviations such as "LOL", "BRB", "IMO", and many others. The integration of such content into
the ESL/EFL curriculum can make learning more engaging, relevant, and effective.
Keywords:
Reading comprehension, social abbreviations, ESL/EFL methodology, digital literacy, student
engagement.
Introduction:
Reading comprehension is a critical skill
in second language acquisition. As the English language
evolves, learners are increasingly exposed to informal
expressions and abbreviations that are prevalent in
online
communication.
Understanding
these
abbreviations is essential not only for accurate
interpretation of texts but also for cultural competence
and communicative efficiency. Social acronyms or
social abbreviations and acronyms are written
language forms widely used in e-communications.
Instant messaging, e-mail, and chatting in text and
online forums are all formats that use slight variations
of Internet language, such as abbreviations, acronyms,
truncations, word play, and other written language
forms.
METHOD
One particular subset of these new written language
forms are social acronyms. Social acronyms on the
Internet generally involve the abbreviation of a phrase
into a “new” acronym/abbreviation by taking the
phrase’s letters or syllables and morphing them into a
‘‘new’’ acronym. Writing has been referred to as a
transitional process or as a process that has the goal of
representing processes.
Computers, the Internet and e-mail have opened new
territories for people all over the world. The Internet
has facilitated not only individual chat and e-mail but
also the access to all sorts of information such as news
and libraries. Other Internet applications include
teleconferences and courses. This new electronic world
has also created a new type of language, which has
been called Internet language or even Picolang, as it is
a sort of “constrained” and “limited” language, made of
abbreviations
and
acronyms
and
mental
representations. By using social acronyms in different
e-communications, perceptible influences on text
reading might be likely, leading to the so-called
unfamiliarity effect of SAAs.
The use of social abbreviations is a common form of
computer mediated communication among users of
social networking sites, chat rooms, etc. Such forms of
computer mediated communication are used
increasingly in everyday literacy practices.Reading and
understanding such forms of textual communication in
English have become an essential literacy. However,
the text created in such literacies often contradicts the
norms and conventions of school literacy practices.
Moreover, the students are also not attentive towards
the text entwined with the text, many times, captions,
acronyms and short forms are also used in the captions
and titles in many Facebook pages and newspapers. To
American Journal Of Philological Sciences
45
https://theusajournals.com/index.php/ajps
American Journal Of Philological Sciences (ISSN
–
2771-2273)
address these issues a method, manipulation of titled
text not only italics the manipulative word in the text
but provides the standard form in the title, is proposed.
Reading comprehension is a complex process that
involves the simultaneous application of higher level
language skills, such as inferencing, comprehension
monitoring, and text structure knowledge with lower
level language skills including vocabulary and grammar
(Hogan et al., 2011). The form of grammar most
strongly linked to comprehension in older children is
the understanding of syntax including both complex
sentences and the ability to understand and generate
inferences. Successful comprehenders often use the
most frequent verb when asked to apply new
vocabulary, demonstrating their ability to use syntax
clues to infer word meanings. Higher level language
skills tend to predict comprehension independently of
vocabulary and grammar, which highlights their unique
influence in reading comprehension. This interplay
between syntax and inference in turn affects reading
comprehension,
with
school-age
children
demonstrating a strong link between these abilities in
both fake word and real word conditions. Inference skill
is also a stronger predictor of reading comprehension,
significantly explaining unique variance above that
accounted for by listening comprehension, vocabulary,
and phonological memory.
The age of wireless and ready at hand information
devices such as mobile phones, computers, internet
has welcomed a wider extension of written
abbreviations due to the necessity of faster and easier
linguistic communication. The banking, goods and
service sectors assist to create a business and public life
full of written abbreviation due to the word limitation
of those facilities (Dzahene-Quarshie, 2017). Student
abbreviation users graduate from primary and
secondary schools and enter a campus where written
language is in a much more “complicated” condition
rather than in their daily social life is closely connected
with the high and low kudos of the education and use
of abbreviation. They are forced to read long
sentences, even paragraphs or pages, full of letter
symbols, graphs, diagrams, Chinese characters, tables,
which are generally full of academic or professional
meanings, and too hard and time-consuming to
understand. In such a written world, clever use of
abbreviation helps filtering to extract main ideas, get
easily understood and focus generally on a certain topic
that requires efforts to learn initially. Texting
abbreviation influences the recipient’s perception of
the message. As such the relation of social abbreviation
to education will be inevitably focused on reading
comprehension. Abbreviated reading is a small but
important aspect of abbreviation usage which tend to
be overlooked by educators. Closer attention from
educators should be paid to the impact of social
abbreviation in modern communication. The fast
development of written abbreviation used through
mobile phones and social network has sparked a
debate surrounding changes in students’ color of their
writing both in terms of the new rules to meet different
competence needs and their general competency to
use standard written language in education and their
future employment. Different from the perspective of
linguist which focuses on the research of definition,
classification, and rules of abbreviation, the concerns of
educators should be related to student’s learnin
g.
Recent studies on students all around the world, from
primary level to tertiary level, show that some teachers
and educators found the uses of abbreviation
troublesome due to the degradation of handwriting
skill as well as English master. In such a fevered
academic situation, students with the trouble of
abbreviation usage have been shown to have suffered
from the difficulty of reading comprehension,
understanding, and get main ideas easily.
Reading comprehension is often perceived to be the
product of decoding, vocabulary development, and
other lower-level cognitive processes. However,
comprehension "is not uncommonly the first to call
attention to gaps in the other elements of reading."
One intriguing possibility is the promise held by
knowledge centrality indices as a metric for prediction
learning and comprehension. Cognitive attempts to
explain reading comprehension failures have primarily
focused on a few interacting variables such as cognitive
capacity and knowledge. Eye Movement analysis offers
a significant change to test theoretical explanations of
individual differences in comprehension. reports that
reading skill is associated with individual differences in
language processing efficiency as indexed by eye
movements to real-time language processing. A
hypothesis of the present study has been that faster
readers have more efficient language processing skill or
that language processing efficiency mediates the
relationship between reading skill and reading
comprehension; however, there has been a lack of
direct
empirical
evidence
supporting
these
relationships.
The PISA study, which analyses the cognitive skills of
15-year-old students, revealed that wooden behaviour
was most common approaching reading (Kolich-
Vrhovec et al., 2011). On average, 23.6% of student do
not make inferences, 36.7% simply repeat or decipher
some part of the text, 12.3% make a personal
judgement, while causal inferences are the least
common (11.9%) approach. On the other hand,
successful reading was characterized by combining
American Journal Of Philological Sciences
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https://theusajournals.com/index.php/ajps
American Journal Of Philological Sciences (ISSN
–
2771-2273)
literal information with bridging inferences and
paraphrases with elaborations, which are dependent
on reading achievement.
There was a time when writing was limited to formal
settings, such as sending a letter to your grandma, an
application for a job or an official report, this era is no
longer reality. The increase of the internet’s popularity
and technology acceleration in portable devices has led
to an each-time-more extended use of e-mail for
personal messages and social networks for social
networking, leisure and fun. Youngsters, and even not-
so-young people have switched to a quicker, shorter
and more immediate language, full of abbreviations
and symbols, which are not always intelligible to
everyday users, producing a drift in communication or
a generation gap. This is actually the core of this
project: the study of individual and contextual variables
that might influence language comprehension in
reading social abbreviations; whole literacy education;
and development of a tool. Though school literacy is
still based in traditional contexts, the fact is that new
writing has emerged into society, namely SMS, instant
messages or web-written language; and, as such, they
need to be read and comprehended. One of the
objectives of this work was the development of an
instrument that might evaluate the comprehension of
a series of social abbreviations in a context; it might be
useful in other research works. Participation in it
implied awareness of the way social web-written
language is created and meaning interpreted. This
project implied the input of cooperation between
researchers, language teachers and designers. The first
helped define typing; the second implemented the
typing and the third created the interface. An
experimental design was implemented in which it was
manipulated if writing requirements of social
abbreviations were included when the e-mails were
generated. Users were randomly given social or
standard e-mails and, after reading they were tested on
literal and inferential data. Different parameters like
cognitive resources, type of task, uses of
communication
strategies
were
taken
into
consideration and revised in the leap of the
experiments’ design. Staying in the loop this
experimental design was unexpected and unusual for
language teachers and required their continuous
feedback concerning the wording of the experiment
and approach to the results.Students aged 19-23 years
participated in this experiment. Two classes were
randomly assigned to a control group and the other
two to an experimental group. The experimental group,
before reading an e-mail, would write an answer of
social abbreviations to the e-mail they were reading.
On the contrary, students of the control group had to
report an answer with full orthography: they were not
allowed to shorten the words or use digital characters.
This, using still experimental groups changed the way
in which details were presented and controlled in the
class, that was more traditional and based on existing
material.
The participants in this study are two Asian and
American high school students who struggle with
Reading Comprehension. The participants will be
identified as Tony and Doni. They will participate in
structured note taking (SN), written retell (WR) or both
during a 16-week quasi-experimental study. Tony, a
male is 20-years-old with a June birthday. He resides
with both biological parents and 4 siblings. Tony claims
to pass English on quizzes due to knowing the material,
but struggles with written responses because he
forgets “how to go in depth”. He’s worried about leaf
-
shaped notes and is okay with using them to retell a
text. Tony scored a 66 on the assessments, which is a
low “ok” score. Doni, a female is 20 years old with an
April birthday. She resides with a single father and a
younger sister. Doni enjoys reading mysteries and
claims “I can get lost in them”. She seems to have an
attachment to my reading worksheets. Doni scored a 3
on the informal assessment as demonstrated by the
blank retell. The students attended XXX from either the
beginning of the school year or halfway through.
Moreover, they qualified for free breakfast and lunch.
The QRI-5 was completed by both students (Tony
Mode, Grade 8th; Deja Mode, Grade 4th). It was
revealed that both participants have reading
comprehension 2 years below grade level. Descriptive
data for Tony and Deja is shown on Table 1.
The purpose of this quasi-experimental multiple probe
design was to investigate the effect of structured note
taking (SN, independent variable) and written retell
(WR, independent variable) on the overall reading
comprehension (dependent variable) of two struggling
African American ninth graders (participants).
Moreover, the researchers intended to fill a gap in the
literature investigating the effects of SN and SN + WR
to improve reading comprehension over an extended
period of time, as (Prochnow, 2016) tested the effects
of both methods on only one aspect of reading
comprehension within a few trials or days. Said
intervention was conducted in the freshmen
classrooms using the required texts and previously
determined whether modeling of the SN and WR
procedures increased reading comprehension.
The Reading Comprehension class was implemented by
using a sociocultural approach to read the reading texts
more critically and in a meaningful way. The reading
texts were social abbreviations. The aim of this study
was to find out whether or not the Reading
American Journal Of Philological Sciences
47
https://theusajournals.com/index.php/ajps
American Journal Of Philological Sciences (ISSN
–
2771-2273)
Comprehension class using the sociocultural approach
can enhance students’ reading comprehension skills of
the experimental group in comparison with the
traditional reading instruction of the control group. The
research questions of this qualitative research were:
“a) What are the effects of sociocultural reading
instruction on students’ reading comprehension skills?
b) How do sociocultural reading skills enhance
students’ reading comprehension?” If so, in what
ways?”
The time limit for reading comprehension parts in this
reading test was 50 minutes. The structures of the
passages in the test were description and compare-
contrast. In giving the reading test, the selected
descriptive reading texts should be clearly understood
by considering the curriculum. Moreover, the selected
reading texts should also consist of structure passages
which will assess the understanding of the text
structure. Additionally, there was a need to turn to the
teacher roles in teaching reading comprehension. One
way to be a good teacher in teaching reading is to
develop alternative methods and techniques in
teaching
reading
comprehension.
Inadequate
performance of passage type, so a reading strategy
instruction in identifying text types was suggested to
improve
the
students’
reflective
reading
comprehension on national examinations.
CONCLUSION
Incorporating social abbreviations into ESL/EFL reading
activities can significantly enhance students' reading
comprehension
and
cultural
awareness.
This
methodology not only prepares learners for real-life
communication but also bridges the gap between
formal language learning and everyday language use.
REFERENCES
Saleem, T. and Azam, S. (2014). The Use of sociocultural
approach for teaching ESL reading skills high level
students.
Hogan, T., Sittner Bridges, M., M. Justice, L., and Cain,
K. (2011). Increasing higher level language skills to
improve reading comprehension.
Dzahene-Quarshie, J. (2017). Localizing global trends in
sms texting language among students in the Asian
students.
Kolich-Vrhovec, S., Bajsanski, I., and Ronchevich
Zubkovich, B. (2011). The role of reading strategies in
scientific
text
comprehension
and
academic
achievement of university students.
Prochnow, C. (2016). The effectiveness of a structured
note taking and written retell intervention on
increasing overall reading comprehension.
