Transformation Of English Grammar: The Digital Communication Among The University Students

Abstract

Smartphones, social networking and IM have changed the way university students write texts, and the way some teachers think about English grammar. The linguistic and educational literature for digital communication is summarized in this paper and the question of the impact of the Internet on the grammar of university students' writing is explored. It argues for the evidence showing that there is no decline and that adaptation is required. Students use a variety of informal features, such as abbreviations, omission of punctuation, creative capitalization, emoji, and new discourse markers, but typically make these register-specific decisions, not in lieu of traditional grammar. There are, however, certain problems in the literary field: the transfer of informal features into formal compositions, lack of uniformity in students' knowledge of the rules/grammatical structures where they were not well educated in formal grammar, and specific problems with multilingual contexts where English is a second language. 

Keywords: The digital communication, English grammar, computer-mediated communication (CMC), university students, texting, register, code switching, academic writing.