The fact that many American public schools had abandoned the teaching of phonics years earlier—replacing it with the “balanced literacy” approach favored by progressive educators16—may have made the creation of the new language easier. Because reading instruction had come to place more stress on recognizing words visually than sounding them out phonetically, teens and preteens likely had a diminished auditory sense of written language and a propensity to interpret written characters as visual symbols. They had been trained to read more by eye than by ear—a hindrance to book reading but a boon
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