Investigating the influence of Whatsapp and Facebook on secondary school students’ writing skills

Abstract

The aim of this paper was to investigate the influence of WhatsApp and Facebook on secondary school students English writing skills. A direct relationship exists between social media usage and academic performance of students in secondary schools. Social networking sites have been recognised as an important resource for education today. In order to investigate the influence of WhatsApp and Facebook on secondary school students’ English writing, the study adopted a descriptive case study to collect qualitative data. The researcher engaged 30 sampled students on online conversation through Facebook and WhatsApp as one way of collecting data. An in- depth interview was conducted for both students and teachers using a voice recorder. Data was coded, transcribed and developed into themes for thorough analysis. The research findings the study indicate that students’ writing are abound by writing errors. Letter or word omissions, vocabulary incompetence, non-words, abbreviations, acronyms, short forms and slangs and apostrophe misappropriation were evident. This shows that students use Facebook and WhatsApp in a negative way and this has an influence on students’ writing. The study, however, recommends that learners should be encouraged to focus more on the academic relevance of Facebook and WhatsApp sites instead of using them for negative purposes. Furthermore, secondary school students must identify, learn and adopt the correct orthography of the English language to forestall spelling errors arising from the use of Facebook and WhatsApp. In addition, the study encourages teachers to vary methods of teaching to combat the problems influenced by Facebook and WhatsApp.