The Impact of Social Media on EFL Students’Writing Performance Case Study: Second Year LMD Students Department of English at Abbes LaghrourUniversity Khenchela
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Date
2020
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
UNIVERSITY OF ABBES LAGHROUR-KHENCHELA
Abstract
Abstract
Social media becomes the first and the easiest source of getting information. It is
considered as a tool that allows people quickly gain knowledge. Social media and education
goes hand in hand nowadays. It plays a great role in developing the teaching and learning
process. This study aims to investigate the impact of social media on English language
learners’ writing proficiency at the University of Khenchela. The researchers hypothesized
that there is a relationship between social media and the development of EFL learners’ writing
skill. To valid this hypothesis, triangulation is used.
A questionnaire administrated to 51 students of second year English from different ages.
A WhatsApp conversation between two students is analyzed carefully, in addition to that, four
paragraphs written b the same sample are observed to detect the effects of these new
technologies on students’ writing. The results of the the questionnaire shows that EFL
learners at the University of Abbes Laghrour are affected by the use of social media in the
way of learning new grammar and vocabularies through communicating with the others, also
they are affected on the way of using abbreviations and shortcutting words , the misuse of
punctuations in their formal writing. Concerning the analysis of the whatsApp extracts, a
remarkable differences between the formal and the informal writing, students use
abbreviations, emojis, shortcutting words, code switching ..etc in their chat language. The
analysis of the paragraphs also shows that students are affected by the chat language in their
writing according to the kinds of mistakes they made in their paragraphs, grammar and
spelling errors which mean that students may forget how to write words, also the use of
abbreviations.