English Language Usage in SNS and Mobile Phones: A Bane or Boon?

The unprecedented growth of technology in all areas of education and industry has greatly impacted the language learning environment, especially via social networking sites (SNSs). Furthermore, judging from the demographic details of account holders, younger and younger people are getting tech-savvy and jumping onto the social media bandwagon. It is therefore interesting to study how learners use language to communicate. A review of literature shows that several factors are associated with language learning trends: motivation, learning environment and imitation. This paper presents a quantitative study conducted on 236 respondents from private universities in two states in Malaysia. The study aims to assess the influence of the language used in SNSs in students' everyday language usage, taking into consideration their various levels of English proficiency. The survey questions helped identify linguistic features such as the frequency of code switching, eccentric spelling and leet, which expanded the research base. Amazingly, although typed communication is becoming 'shorter' through the use of acronyms and abbreviations, these young users are totally familiar with the graphic symbols and other abbreviations used in such typed communication. That the majority of respondents were from the Chinese ethnic group added to the fact that mother tongue use also played a part in affecting their proficiency in the English Language. The questionnaires were analyzed via the descriptive statistical method. The data obtained showed the heavy usage of short messaging texts by almost all respondents who own a mobile device. The text discourses were then analyzed to authenticate research findings as well. In the final analysis, it was found that the constant and frequent use of short messaging did not profoundly affect the participants' English language proficiency. Due to the requirements of the universities' examination papers, it was found that participants consciously avoided language used on SNSs for their written examination papers. The explosion in SNSs has actually given rise to a generation of super-fast fingertapping youngsters who, more often than not, are creating their own meta language, which for this research is an exciting opportunity to explore the implications and far-reaching consequences on their English language execution. This mediumscale survey was conducted at two major locations as a prelude to greater mining of data and an even bigger research opportunity. In Malaysia, where the student generation is lapping up SNSs and mobile phone apps such as Whatsapp, Viber, Hangouts, Line, WeChat and Tango, this research is beneficial as a starting point for research on the 'evolution' of the English language in these areas and the extent to which the influence might foster or stunt proficiency in the language. This can potentially also facilitate the comparative analysis of how the English lingo of students from metropolitan and cosmopolitan or rural and urban areas is controlled by their engagement in SNSs. The results of the present study will definitely enrich the corpus of work conducted on the influence of language of social media and encourage further detailed research in this area.