(1143) THE IMPACT OF COMPUTER-MEDIATED COMMUNICATION ON EFL LEARNERS’ ACADEMIC WRITING: A CASE STUDY

摘要

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 intensive use of certain communication technology. This paper explores the influence of chat language, as a novel communication medium, on 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 second year license at the English Department in Laghouat University-Algeria. Indeed, the findings demonstrated that the over use of the chat affects students’ language literacy, by transferring the pattern of written proper for computermediated communication (chat) 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.