Impact of social media language on writings of the undergraduates of university of Nigeria, Nsukka

Abstract

This paper investigated the impact of social media language on writings of the undergraduates of University of Nigeria, Nsukka. The aim of this paper was to identify the extent to which SMS language has influenced the writings of undergraduates. Also, to confirm or refute the arguments and counteraugments that had raised dust in the academics over the presupposed negative effects of this form of media discourse on students’ academic writings. This study draws insights from Corder’s Error Analysis. The corpus of this study was gotten from an eight-item-questionnaire and confirmatory essay test administered to forty students selected at random. Data elicited from the questionnaires were  analyzed quantitatively using the simple percentage and represented in bar charts and lines respectively; while the students’ essays were scanned for linguistic features of SMS. The findings revealed that students’ use of SMS is pervasive but it does not significantly impact writings negatively. The researchers, therefore, concluded that SMS language does not pose major threats to students’ formal writings. Thus, they suggested that users of SMS should try as much as they could to always check their works carefully in order to avoid committing errors in formal writings.

Keywords: Error Analysis, impact, linguistic features, social media language, and writing