The impact of facebook on learners' academic writing.

Abstract

The rapid development of technology makes a language evolve quickly and this may affect English learners’ productions, the effect on the English language is either in a positive way by adding new words to the dictionary or a negative way by missing the grammar and using incorrect abbreviated words like turning you’re” to “your”. This study aims at identifying the impact of the use of chatting on learners’ academic writing and at bringing out the instances of linguistic deviations practices by students users in cyberspace. It gives an interest to the influence of written media interaction taking place in a real time on the internet; mainly Facebook (online) chats. This work shows a complete picture of the overuse of Facebook and its effect on learner’s formal writing. Accordingly, the research questions discussed here are mainly about the influence of Facebook chatting on English learners’ formal writing which is our main focus. We hypothesize that if learners are over exposed to chat, their academic writing would be negatively affected. The hypothesis is evaluated by a descriptive study inferred from the results of the questionnaires that were handed to first and second year English master students at Ibn Khaldoun University of Tiaret, in addiction to that, the analysis of learners’ written paragraphs which offer a reliable framework in that they provide how orthography, grammar, spelling, and lack of punctuation are practiced by learners, besides the observation of extracts from Facebook chat in order to see how students practice the English language while chatting, this adaptation of new written English has a negative impact on learners’ written productions and on the English language. The results of this investigation confirmed the hypothesis and showed that the frequent use of Facebook chat has clearly a negative impact on learners’ academic writing. On the basic of the results obtained, some recommendations have been proposed to learners.