A corpus-based study on social media english lexicon: comprenhensibility in ESL and EFL students

Abstract

The current status of English as ‘lingua franca’ acquired throughout the last two centuries, as well as the development and rise of Internet and social media have originated the emergence of a new kind of language with a particular and characteristic vocabulary: Social Media English Lexicon (SMEL). Nowadays, the majority of the world population uses social networks, but most people utilize this genre without being really aware of its linguistic peculiarities. As this sort of genre is not taught at schools, SMEL understandability among non-native English speakers seems an interesting research gap to be filled by studies like this one. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to analyse the level of comprenhensibility of SMEL among EFL and ESL students and to compare it. In order to fulfil this aim, Twitter has been the social medium selected to create a corpus based on SMEL. Once all the data have been compiled, a questionnaire has been created and administered to a human sample of EFL and ESL students who met the established requirements. Frequency analyses revealed that both groups of participants can understand this English genre although ESL students’ comprenhensibility level is better because of their English proficiency level. Surprisingly, context does not seem to play a much relevant role in comprehensibility among the EFL group. In addition, none of the groups acknowledges the need or desire to study this kind of English at schools, since they believe it would negatively affect their written language competence in English.