The Impact of Social Media on EFL students' Writing

Abstract

The world has become a small village due to the expansion of social media in our daily life. This expansion affects people's life in many aspects among them is educational aspect. Thus, students use social media to improve and develop their skills especially EFL students. This study aims to tackle what are the effects of social media on EFL students' writing? And why students use abbreviations and acronyms in academic writing. The qualitative and the quantitative methodologies are fitted this study. The results show that most students revealed that social media have a negative impact on their formal writing, and the main reasons behind using abbreviations in academic writing are gaining time, facilitating the process of communication, being a habit, and forgetting the form of the words. Finally, we propose suggestions for the future study to make differences between the academic writing and informal writing.