EFFECTS OF SOCIAL MEDIA ON WRITTEN ENGLISH SKILLS OF SENIOR SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS IN NIGERIA

Abstract

The challenges identified as a result of excessive use of social media in Nigerian secondary schools are enormous. This formed the basic need to find effective ways to utilize social media as a teaching medium for secondary school students. Thus, researchers selected one of the social media platforms and investigated its efficacy on the written English performance of selected senior secondary school students. The study specifically used Facebook and selected one hundred and eighty (180) students from Government Secondary Schools; Bomo Government Secondary School, Basawa and Government Girls’ Secondary School, Samaru, as the experimental group, and one hundred and eighty (180) students from Government Secondary School, Jama’a, Government Secondary School, Kwangila, Government Secondary School, Sakadadi, and Demonstration Secondary School, Samaru as the control group. A t-test was used for the test with the aim of identifying the differences between the performance of students exposed to Facebook, and those that were not. The investigation involved pre-test, test I, test II, test III and a final test. One research question and one hypothesis were generated, tested and answered. The result of the study revealed significant differences between the written English mean performance score of the experimental and control group. The study proved that the use of this social media platform can lead to greater writing achievement among students. Therefore, it is recommended that students should be encouraged to use Facebook as a means of learning not only written English but the English language in general.