Abstract
The aim of the paper is to investigate the different ways in which chat language has affected university students’ academic writing in a Lebanese private university. The study was carried out through a questionnaire which was distributed to 36 students. A corpus was built from students’ essays on different topics such as racism, gender, language studies, and management among others. Students’ essays were analyzed to extract the mistakes that are a result of chat language. The results emphasize the arising concern about the potential effects of chat language on students’ writing performance and the students’ academic interaction due to many reasons such as mixing more than two or three languages together (Arabic, English and French), grammar mistakes, coherence, omitting vowels and letters, disrespecting punctuation and capitalization; hence, introducing the concept of lazy mixing to serve easy communication.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Al-Salman, S. M., & Saeed, A. T. (2017). Effects of text-messaging on the academic writing of Arab EFL students. Research in Language, 15(3), 237–252.
Aziz, S., Shamim, M., Aziz, M. F., & Avais, P. (2013). The impact of texting/SMS language on academic writing of students-what do we need to panic about? Elixir Linguistics and Translation, 55(2013), 12884–12890.
Durkin, K., Conti-Ramsden, G., & Walker, A. J. (2011). Txt lang: Texting, textism use and literacy abilities in adolescents with and without specific language impairment. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 27(1), 49–57.
Hashemifardnya, A., Namaziandoost, I., & Tamim, A. B. (2016). The impact of chatting with native speakers in social networks on young Iranian English university students’ intrinsic motivation toward learning speaking skill. Modern Journal of Language Teaching Methods, 6(4), 510–518.
Herring, S. C. (2008). Language and the internet. In W. Donsbach (Ed.), International encyclopedia of communication (pp. 2640–2645). Oxford: Blackwell.
Merchant, G. (2001). Teenagers in cyberspace: An investigation of language use and language change in internet chatrooms. Journal of Research in Reading, 24(3), 293–306.
Palfreyman, D., & Khalil, M. A. (2003). “A funky language for teenzz to use:” Representing Gulf Arabic in instant messaging. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 9(1), JCMC91. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2003.tb00355.x.
Peel, R. (2004). The internet and language use: A case study in the United Arab Emirates. International Journal on Multicultural Societies, 6(1), 79–91.
Reid, D., & Reid, F. (2004). Insights into the social and psychological effects of SMS text messaging. Retrieved from http://www.160characters.org/documents/SocialEffectsOfTextMessaging.pdf.
Van Dijk, C. N., Van Witteloostuijn, M., Vasić, N., Avrutin, S., & Blom, E. (2016). The influence of texting language on grammar and executive functions in primary school children. PloS One, 11(3). Article ID e0152409.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Al-Bekai, W. (2020). The Effects of Chat Language on Students’ Academic Writing: A Case Study of Private Lebanese University Students. In: Kenny, N., Işık-Taş, E., Jian, H. (eds) English for Specific Purposes Instruction and Research. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32914-3_16
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32914-3_16
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-32913-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-32914-3
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)