Vol. 1 Issue 1 - 2024
This study was borne of a need to inquire into the influence of social media use on the performance of high school students in English orthography bearing in mind the palpable influence which ‘Internetspeak’ currently wields on the spoken English of Nigerian youths. Its data were thirty writing samples from the academic writing, selected through stratified random sampling, of one hundred and fifty students in Ifelodun local government of Osun State used in conjunction with a questionnaire that sought to affirm the fact, and frequency, of social media usage by the target population. Adopting Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar as theory steeped in language pedagogy, it subjected the data to series of statistical and descriptive analysis to explicate both the influence that use of social media has on subject’s writings in academic situations as well as the nature of the orthographic infelicities observed. It found that a significant percentage of sampled students commit orthographic errors including hyper-shortening of words and Internet-induced wrong spelling which are directly traceable to Textese. The paper also established that the rate of social media use among the population is high and has directly proportional level of influence on their spelling. It concludes that students are often unaware of the need to restrict textese to online contexts as well as equip themselves with the ‘correct’ forms of writing. It recommends that English language teachers include a focus on variants of orthography and situational appropriateness in their teaching of writing and orthography.
Orthography, Language Pedagogy, Situational Appropriateness, Textese
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