Employing an explanatory design, this study set out to investigate the morphosyntacticstructures of the SMS language of Communication English I students, and the types of SMSlanguage features used in their written work at a university of technology in South Africa. Thestudy randomly sampled 90 undergraduate students (M = 40; F = 50) enrolled for a nationaldiploma programme during the first academic semester in 2013. Their ages ranged from 19-22years; they all spoke English as a second language, whilst having one of the five black SouthAfrican languages as their home language. The study had two types of data: participants' mobilephone text messages (in two sets), and their writing samples. Two of the findings of the studyare: the morphological structure of the textisms used in the participants' text messages deviatedfrom that applicable to formal, standard English, whereas much of their syntactic structure didnot; and, the frequency and proportion of textisms in participants' writing samples were lowerthan that reported in studies by Freudenberg (2009) and Rosen et al. (2010).