Résumé:
The present dissertation deals with the use of social media in education, the study aims at
investigating namely the impact of Facebook language on foreign language learners’ writing
skill; case study of first year Master students of the English department at the University of
Guelma. By examining this impact, it has been hypothesized that if the students overuse the
Facebook language, this would have a negative impact on their writing skill. This study has
been carried out through a qualitative data from students’ corpora that have been collected,
and another quantitative data from students’ questionnaire, which was addressed to 97
students. Hence, the findings of the present dissertation demonstrate that students are highly
addicted to Facebook, they use improper language within the academia, and that was mainly
due to their overuse of the net language. A further finding reveals that students’ writings at the
morphological level are affected by net language, especially the use of incorrect spelling,
informal language (contractions), and abbreviations. Hence, we advocate that the students
should be aware of the technologies harms, they should use proper language everywhere and
avoid the use of informal language and abbreviations, which might affect their writing system
later on. We also believe that teachers should severely react towards such improper usage of
language for instance by mark reduction whenever they find such inclusion of informal
language.
