The Use of Social Networking Sites in Education: The Impact of Facebook Language on Foreign Language Learners’ Writing Skill:

Abstract

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.