Learn English – What do you call words such as “the, an, a, to, and”

Wikipedia suggests the name "SMS Language", but also offers "textese", "texting language", and "chatspeak", among others.

These words (Look, Listen) are imperatives used as interjections. You can replace them with Hey! or Gosh! or Cowabunga, Buffalo Bob!, or other exclamations, and the effect is essentially the same: Pay attention to what I'm saying!

[EDITED]: Using the term discourse marker is probably pointless because it's quite technical and doesn't help people understand why Look and Listen are used or how they function in those sentences. It also doesn't help EFL students speak better English. Terms like imperative, interjection, and exclamation are standard fare in their secondary school and university English classes and textbooks. I think that they don't need more than those to talk about these words and their function. The point, IMHO, is to teach them how to use the language, not to teach them how to talk about it, unless, of course, you're teaching a linguistics course. But in that case, I think you'd be a professional linguist yourself and wouldn't need to ask this question.

My experience in EFL classes in Japan (10 years) and Taiwan (17 years) has been that students want to learn "useful" English (whatever they think that means) and because they're taught English grammar rules from primary school on, they ask for technical grammatical information: they seem to believe that knowing the terms and the rules will help them, but this is patently false, as anyone who's lived and worked in both those countries knows.