Social Network Communication: Emojis and EFL learners’ Writing Issues

Abstract

This study aims to find out the impacts of using emojis by EFL learners on their writing skills and highlight the learners’ attitudes towards this new communication phenomenon. It discusses the different uses of emojis in social media apps, investigates the reasons for the rise of using emojis in everyday social interaction, and to which extent the occurrence of this pictographic script can substitute the written language. A qualitative and quantitative analysis has been applied in this investigation where a survey-based questionnaire was distributed among 143 EFL learners in Taibah University in Saudi Arabia. Descriptive statistics and ANOVA (analysis of variables) are used to analyze the obtained data. The results show that the p-value of the study variables is equal to one which is much bigger than alpha and there is no big difference between the variables’ estimation in the participants’ responses, i.e. the emojis’ use in texting affects the use of the language. Moreover, the findings display that the use of emojis and short forms (contractions and acronyms) in text messages form a real threat to the standard and non-standard languages. The outcomes of this study make it clear this new sort of communication may replace mainly languages where social media users found that emojis best represent their feelings and thoughts. This research concluded that the use of emojis has an important role in interpersonal communications, however, standard writing skills would be negatively affected using these newly emerged communication tools. The consequences of these impacts are aptly evidenced in the form of spelling, structural errors, and weakness of expressions in EFL learners’ language learning.

The pragmatic functions of emojis in Arabic tweets

“…We noted that these emojis are used to denote emotions. The results here were consistent with those of prior studies regarding the common emojis in different languages and platforms (Sampietro, 2019;Tantawi and Rosson, 2019;Wirza et al, 2019;Al-Garaady and Mahyoob, 2021;Etman and Elkareh, 2021). The results also indicated that Arab users tend to use different types of emoji, including facial expressions and hand gestures, to express their emotions and feelings in online communication, consistent with the findings of numerous studies.…”

“…Furthermore, Apple released the IOS5 system, which included emojis, as a step toward increasing the popularity of emojis and emphasizing their power in 2010. Also, emojis have been unified in the Unicode standard form, allowing them to be utilized in practically all languages and applications around the world (Danesi, 2017;Ge and Herring, 2018;Konrad et al, 2020;Abbas and Ubeid, 2021;Al-Garaady and Mahyoob, 2021). Emojis were created to make emoticons more comprehensive in pictures; however, both emojis and emoticons have similar functions such as tone marking (Konrad et al, 2020).…”

Exploring Lexico-Grammatical Patterns in Saudi Press Reportage: A Multidimensional Analysis

“…The results of this study indicate that English in Saudi Arabia is being 'nativised', and this nativized/ localized English represents the local culture and their social and religious beliefs. Other research works (Al-Belehi, 2021;Algaraady & Mahyoob, 2021;Alghammas, 2020) studied the writings of EFL learners. However, their scope was limited to error analysis and students' perspectives toward learning English.…”

Enhancing EFL Learners’ Self-Efficacy Beliefs of Learning English with Emoji Feedbacks in CALL: Why and How

“…The participants in their study utilized positive emojis such as “thumb up” or “smiling face” to express support for their peers. Al-Garaady and Mahyoob (2021) revealed that the EFL learner participants of their study liked to use emojis for communication [ 56 ], but such an application is likely to have negative effects [ 57 , 58 ]; specifically, emojis could negatively affect their writing skills as their standard writing might be sacrificed because of these convenient and emergent communication tools. Liu et al (2021) examined the use of peer feedback in face-to-face and online EFL writing courses; the Chinese EFL learners in their study indicated that emojis can be beneficial in cultivating positive emotions and building rapport among peers [ 59 ].…”