Influence of digital social media in writing and speaking of tertiary level student

Abstract

The creation of digital social media has brought a huge change among the people of 20th century. This new technology carries much weight as a new medium for students and also for the educators to build social connections. Anderson (2008) says online learning, as a subset of all distance education, has always been concerned with provision of access to educational experience that is, at the least, more flexible in time and in space than campus-based education (p. 53). The purpose of that study is to find out how the digital social media influence the writing and speaking, how they motivate students to improve their productive skills, and in what extend SNS is useful for the students to improve English language. With the aim of exploring the influence of digital social media in writing and speaking of tertiary level student, this research was conducted at 8 private and public universities in Bangladesh. A sample of sixteen teachers and one hundred sixty students were respectively selected from five private universities and three public universities in Bangladesh. Both qualitative and quantitative methods were applied during data analysis. The results indicated that digital social media has several influence in the writing and speaking of tertiary level student with the positive effects outweighing the negative effects. The findings confirmed that students as well as the teachers can formulate group discussions where they can exchange their ideas, can share course related materials, appeal to their student about assignments which helping the students to enhance their writing as well as their speaking. However the findings affirmed that digital social media also has some negative influence. The students use short form of words, incorrect grammar and sentence structure in their formal writing and speaking unconsciously, which are the affects of digital social media as students are now much more familiar with those types of language. So the principal conclusion was that the use of digital social media has both positive and negative influence, but the student has to motivate themselves properly to utilize the use of SNS which will enrich their English writing and speaking.