The link between students' spelling level and their text-messaging practice gives rise to numerous questions from teachers, parents and the media. A corpus of 4524 text messages produced in daily-life situations by students in sixth and seventh grade (n?=?19, 11-12 years of age) was compiled. None of the participants had ever owned or used a mobile phone before the start of the study; their text messages were collected monthly over the course of a year. The comparison between the group with mobile phones and the control group without mobile phones (n?=?30) showed no difference between the level of traditional writing at the beginning of the text-message collection and during the collection. The results showed that the correlation between the level of traditional spelling and the density of textisms was dependent upon the type of textisms (consistent/breaking with traditional code), the type of spelling (usage-based/rule-based), the grades in French class and the duration of text-messaging practice. On the whole, students who were skilled or less skilled in traditional writing at the beginning of the text-message collection remained respectively skilled or less skilled throughout the year, despite their text-messaging use (density and type of textisms). The discussion of this study's academic implications tends towards a complementarity between traditional writing and text messaging.