Журнал искусств и социальных наук

The Impact of Social Networks on ESL Undergraduate Students’ Writing in Nigeria

Abstract

Iro Sani and Mohammed Sada Bature

It is a well-known fact that social networking is becoming more and more common among the people of different backgrounds world over. Like their other counterparts across the globe, Nigerian youths especially students in tertiary or higher institutions of learning are seriously engaged in communicating with each other both at local and global levels through these social networks. They are involved in chatting, conveying comments, remarks or feedback on a particular issue at a given social medium such as Face book, twitter and 2go. This paper examines the negative impact of using such social networks to the Nigerian ESL students writing in academic setting. The primary aim of this paper is to show the extent to which these social networks affect their writing behavior. A textual analysis is used to examine the data of this study which is obtained from three most pervasive and commonly used social networks: Face book, 2 go and twitter. The results indicate that students’ writing is hampered by serious writing impediments occurring mainly at three important and crucial writing aspects: lexis, punctuation and grammar.