Texting Language in Learning Activities in the Age of Social Media

Abstract

Social media technology has revolutionized the art of new communication including social work education. Over the past ten years, the emergence of the site social  media has changed educational and learning activities beyond the traditional classroom practices. Today teachers are starting to embrace social media as additional instruments for students' learning. The technology in social media used in the classrooms begins to be accepted as the best used when it helps L2 learners to meet learning objectives. It is the prevalent use of technology in social work education, but discussion about the use of social media in the context of language classrooms is often neglected. The explosion of social media through Blogs, Twitter, WhatsApp, Facebook, and E-Text creates Texting Language (TL). TL used many types of word or phrase’s abbreviations in the forms of acronym, substitutions, omissions, contractions, pictograms or logograms. As a result, many have been engaging with frequent texting, posting, and commenting on various media sources. This phenomenon invites a great deal of debate among group of scholars who believe that texting language has negative effects while some other see the reverse; texting message as another language. On the other hand, the third group are not sure about the effect of such language. Contrary to the different view of two camps above dealing with texting as a blessing, rather than a harm, to students’ literacy. Not only under the reasons to save time and cost, texting language is also seen  as possibility to create a third language among young generations which can motivate them to be more creative and innovative in language use. Therefore, when TL as the language of social media enters classroom, an attempt needs to take about the ethical guidelines and social media policy in classrooms. If not, it results in critical pedagogy, which holds that informal and everyday places and speech are intrinsically and ubiquitously instructive, and that students—mostly digital natives—should construct identities and social structures in formal classrooms.