Investigating the effect of texting and online chatting on EFL learners’ writing skill.

Abstract

Abstract Text messaging has been a source of debate since it became a popular tool of communication. It is criticized for its negative effect on students’ academic writing because of its constant presence in formal situation. This dissertation presents a study on the effect of texting on the writing skills that targeted third year students of English at the University of Biskra. The five participants were asked to hand over screenshots of their text messages from their mobile phones. In addition, they were asked to answer a question in a form of a paragraph to be the representation of their academic writing skill. The results of the analysis of both texts and paragraphs confirmed the hypotheses. It showed that there is a negative effect which appears on the lexical level and the structural one in students’ writing in forms of informal language and misuse of punctuation. This study should provide help to teachers and students to be aware of the effect that texting has on writing in order to be able to control it.