Social media language and Students’ English writing a case of Oti Boateng Senior High

Abstract

This study examined the influence of social media language in essays of secondary level students at Oti Boateng Senior High School, Koforidua – Ada in the New Juabeng South Municipality. Three research objectives that guided this study were (1) identify the elements of social media language used by students of Oti Boateng Senior High School, (2) find out the linguistics categories of the social media language used by the students and (3) examine how social media language influence the students’ English language writing. The nature of the study was qualitative with content analysis being the research design. The data for the study was students’ essays. Purposive sampling technique was adopted to ensure that students’ essays selected have relevant social media language needed for the study with a sample size of one hundred and fifty (150) respondents. The Social Learning Theory aided in the data analysis supported by Microsoft excel. The findings indicated that social media language has much influence on the writing of secondary level students with the negative effects outweighing the positive effects. The students used elements like abbreviations (11%), phonological contractions (33%) and acoustic representations (36%) in their formal writing which are the effects of writing social media language as students are more familiar with that type of language. Again, the data showed that verbs were the most lexical items used scoring 24%; these verbs were action-oriented and few stative ones. Interjections were the least with only 4%. It also showed compound-complex structures were written most. The results of the analysis indicated finally that students observed, imitated and modelled social media language since students realised there was a meaningful reward for such a behaviour in the global world. The study recommended that teachers enlighten students on the positive and negative effects of writing social media language since the type of English they use on social media is not accepted in academic writing and may affect their academic performance at the end of their secondary education.