The Effect of Social Media Language on Pupil’s Formal Writing Performance The Case Study 3rd Year Foreign Languages Stream Pupils at Mohamed Baarir High School Tolga

Abstract

The over use of social media has recently been highlighted as a new trend within the globalization movement. Various aspects of people's lives are affected by social media, including their education and their learning of English. Social media has now become an integral part of the educational process for pupils, especially for EFL learners. This study aims to find out the effect of social media language on the formal writing performance of the pupils, Moreover, to understand the reasons for this language's use (abbreviations and acronyms). Therefore, we hypothesized that social media has a greatly effects on pupil’s formal writing performance and the pupils are using abbreviations and acronyms in academic writing to save time and space. To confirm the validity of our hypotheses, both qualitative and quantitative methodologies are employed to collect the data. We relied on two different data collection tools, namely a structure questionnaire administrated to fifty (50) 3rd year foreign language pupils at Mohamed Baarir High School, in addition to a structure interview for their teachers from the same High school. The obtained findings showed that the teachers are struggling with social media language (abbreviations and acronyms), and they are trying to find a solution to this problem. According to the results, most pupils believe that social media language has a positive effect on their formal writing and the main reasons behind using abbreviations in academic writing are to save time and space and to make writing more concise and clear. Thus, the results of the study confirmed the validity of our hypotheses. In the end, the researcher recommended for teachers ideas to encourage pupils to write correctly and following the academic writing rules.