Intromission of linguistic phenomena of social networks in formal academic texts: a case study

Abstract

Nowadays, social networks have fostered the use of written language and facilitated communication exchanges, since they have a common language in which the symbols used are outside the established spelling rules. The problem occurs when students transfer the writing patterns of social networks to formal academic texts, disregarding the standard norm and the context. Therefore, the objective of this research is to analyze the incidence of the writing patterns of the digital discursive genre that is WhatsApp in the formal academic discourse of 4th grade students of a high school in the Antofagasta minicipality.

The study is proposed as a non-experimental investigation, from a mixed approach, it is transactional-exploratory and descriptive. The data collection instruments are a questionnaire and a set of linguistic corpora of formal academic texts and corpora of WhatsApp conversations.

The results show that there is an incidence in the use of the writing patterns of the WhatsApp digital discursive genre in academic texts. The linguistic phenomena with the highest predominance are: apocope and lexical substitution by image, however, contrary to expectations, their level of intrusion is low, they do not significantly alter the production or comprehension of the academic text. The above mentioned allows us to reinforce the idea that there must be awareness of the writing process, as academic texts represent the link for the acquisition of professional knowledge, which cannot be neglected in the training of competent citizens for the 21st century.