The effects of chat language on students' academic writing: A case study of private Lebanese university students

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.