Abstract:

Students are compelled to use language appropriately for an effective communication in English. Any improper practice of language is often unacceptable in pedagogical contexts. However, students advertently or inadvertently break linguistic rules, often under the influence of the intensive use of certain communication technology. This paper explores the influence of chat language, as a novel communication medium, in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students’ academic writing. It is intended to discover how this “cyber language” has interfered into our students’ writing assignments. An experimental study was conducted based on the written scripts’ analysis of 100 students of the second-year license at the English Department in Laghouat University-Algeria. Indeed, the findings demonstrated that the overuse of the chat affects students’ language literacy, by transferring the pattern of written properly for computer-mediated communication (CMC) into the participants’ essays of the examination, and hence it leads them to produce less formal pieces of writing. Also, the paper shows some features of the chat language observed in the students’ compositions, which involve graphones, alphanumeric homophony, errors of punctuation, and vowel deletion.

Keywords:

Cyber language, chat language, academic writing, computer-mediated communication.