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THE INFLUENCE OF MESSENGER APPS ON STUDENTS' LITERACY

The 21st century is considered to be the century of virtual communication. It is impossible to imagine a youth environment without so-called messengers, blogs, chats, forums, social networks - all that is included in the concept of Internet communication. The modernized world means using the Internet not only to extract information, but also to transmit it by writing short messages. Cell phone, email, account page allows you to provide fast and reliable transmission of information. In addition, a huge network space provides an opportunity for self-expression.

The Internet has become an integral part of our life. And the adoption of any innovation is carried out primarily through language. Today it is no secret to anyone that when communicating on various websites, young people do not bother themselves with the observance of spelling and punctuation rules. Most often, approximately 60% of the messages and comments on the sites are written with grammar mistakes, and more than half of the remaining 40% are corrected by automatic checking in applications.

While telling someone about their thoughts and current events, regardless of location, many of the traditional rules of grammar and syntax fell victim to speed and instant satisfaction of the need to speak out. On the one hand, users save time and money, because the speed of information transfer and feedback is important, therefore reductions and mangling of words become normal and common. On the other hand, unfortunately, it is noticeably ingrained in the ordinary, everyday life of young people and leads to illiteracy and a decrease in the culture of speech. What is the cause of this phenomenon? Pro-Papers experts tried to figure it out.

Due to the rapid development of social networks, messengers, and a huge number of users, a special student slang has appeared - the communication style of a specific group of people in frequent contact, serving as an identifying mark. Slang is often characterized by a distortion of the norms of the language. A freer communication style is explained by the fact that the user is “virtual”, his/her “name” and personal information are formal.

Communicating on the net with the help of short phrases, denoting emotions with smiley pictures, students develop their new language of communication, built on graphic symbols and words. Smileys are becoming more common, becoming almost generally accepted Internet language. But smileys, in our opinion, are not as harmless as they seem: their frequent use leads to the impoverishment of the language and the inability to use its lexical and syntactic possibilities to express feelings and emotions.

In addition to "emoticons", the so-called "CapsLock" is used to compensate the timbre and to emphasize part of the utterance in virtual communication — the phrase or part of it is written in capital letters, which is interpreted everywhere on the Web as raising your voice. The insufficiency or impossibility of transferring color, sound, or movement on the Internet is replaced by verbal and symbolic analogues - a large number of exclamation marks.

Today, there are two forms of communication on the Internet: offline communication and online communication.

Online communication. This type of online communication through messengers is the most popular in the world. It requires the speed of writing messages, so in online communication they are short and concise. The volume of one message does not exceed 5-6 words. So, the so called Internet slang began to develop written and oral speech gradually. It began to fill the letters of users with more and more slang. 

Offline communication is communication on forums, blogs, chat rooms, e-mail. Such communication does not imply spontaneity, momentary, the message is sent taking into account the fact that the addressee will read it over time. That is, there is a chance that, having a little more time to answer, the user will write a letter taking into account all the grammatical and lexical rules. However, given that such communication occurs less frequently than online communication in messengers, out of habit, most users continue to use slang, make mistakes.

This is the reason for the fall in the overall literacy rate of students and young people in general. In connection with the acceleration of the pace of life, people try to give out information sometimes without thinking about the means of its presentation. The language became secondary. The main thing in modern conditions is the speed of response and its meaning, not grammatical rules. A person who communicates in social networks uses a mobile connection in the format of sms and with the help of messengers, without particularly thinking about how he/she expresses his/her thoughts. Like, well, I did not put a comma, somewhere I made a mistake, a typo - well, it happened. Usually such communication takes place between close people, and the person involved in this daily information flow gradually loses control of himself/herself. And when he/she goes to an unfamiliar audience, he/she continues to make mistakes. Therefore, the Internet and instant messengers have played a negative role in this regard. 

Thus, we see that, thanks to the development of information technologies, the capabilities of modern people have greatly expanded. Recently, virtual communication has replaced personal. In English, which is constantly being developed and updated, a new style of speech has emerged - the language of Internet communication. In this regard, opponents of Internet slang ring the alarm, arguing that interactive communication poses a serious threat to the literacy of the younger generation. Alas, linguistic experts from all over the world are forced to admit that the introduction of the practice of exchanging short interactive messages through social networks into everyday life leads to a decrease in spelling and syntactic literacy, and the slang developed by messenger users goes into common vocabulary. And this, in turn, not only significantly impairs the literacy of students, but also has negative consequences for the language as a whole.

 

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