The Impact of Chatting on Students’ Formal Writing The Case of First Year Master Students of English at Mohammed Kheider University of Biskra

Abstract

This study aims at identifying the impact of the use of chatting on the students’ academic writing. It gives an interest to the influence of written media interaction taking place in a real time on the internet; mainly internet (online) chats. This work shows a complete picture of the overuse of chat and students’ formal writing. Accordingly, the research questions discussed here are mainly four about the influence of the internet and chatting on EFL writing which is our main focus. We hypothesize that if students are over exposed to chat, their written productions would be negatively affected. The hypothesis is evaluated by a descriptive study inferred from the results of the questionnaires were handed to both students of first year master of English at Mohammed Kheider university of Biskra and teachers of written expression module at the same department to investigate what students and teachers themselves think about the influence of chatting on students’ written tasks. From the two questionnaires we get insights to analyze students’ written essays which offer a reliable framework in that they provide how orthographic, grammar, spelling, and lack use of punctuation are practiced by students at the university. This adaptation of written English has a negative impact on the students’ written productions, and makes a difference between writing and speech, in addition to the claims put forwards by Crystal (2001) that the new medium of interaction in Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) it is conducted in ways that are neither spoken nor written interaction “Netspeak” as he pointed out. The results of this investigation confirmed the hypothesis and showed that the frequent use of chat has a negative side besides the deviation on students’ writing in class work (formal writing).On the basis of the results obtained, some pedagogical implications have been proposed to both students and teachers toward the negative side of chatting and its threat on formal writing. Key