The impacts of using abbreviations in asynchronous online social communication among ESL learners

Chong, Pei Lin (2021) The impacts of using abbreviations in asynchronous online social communication among ESL learners. Final Year Project, UTAR.

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Abstract

The revolution of asynchronous online social communication brings convenience to people in communicating with each other and obtaining information. While writing text messages on this platform, it is observed that people prefer to use abbreviations instead of the whole spelling of English words. This phenomenon has created some issues for ESL learners in their academic production. Therefore, this research wishes to investigate the reasons for using abbreviations on asynchronous online social communication and the impacts of usage to the written production among ESL learners. This research applies quantitative and descriptive methods in data collection. From the data, it is found that saving time and easy and comfortable feeling are the reasons for the ESL learners to use abbreviations. However, the excessive usage of abbreviations affects their formal English writing in which it leads to spelling, punctuation and grammar errors. The findings from this research suggests that attention and guidance should be taken to avoid such a phenomenon so that the ESL learners are able to produce academic writing with better quality. However, this research is limited to ESL students and more researches involving larger groups of participants may be done to consolidate the findings for the current research.

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