INFLUENCES OF THE SOCIAL MEDIA TO THE

WRITING AND SPELLING SKILLS OF GRADE

SIX PUPILS OF ALAMINOS ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
S.Y. 2022-2023

Statement of the Problem

This study aimed to determine the Influence of the social media to the Writing and
Spelling Skills of Grade six pupils of Alaminos Elementary School S.Y 2022-2023.

Specifically, this study sought to answer the following questions:

1. What is the demographic profile of the respondents in terms of:

a. age,
b. sex, and
c. number of hours spent in social media?

2. What are the influences of the social media to the pupils in terms of:

a. Writing skills
b. Spelling skills

3. Is there a significant difference on the perceive influence of social media

when respondents are grouped according to number of hours spent in social
media?

Ho: There is no significant difference on the perceived influence of social media

when the respondents are grouped by number of hours spent in social media.
Research Paradigm
INDEPENDENT VARIABLE

 Demographic profile of the Grade six students of Alaminos Elementary School.

o age
o sex
o number of hours spent in social media

 Influence of the social media to the pupils;

o writing skills
o spelling skills

DEPENDENT VARIABLE

 Influences of the social media to the writing and spelling skills of grade six pupils
 Significant difference on the perceived influence of social media when
respondents are grouped according to the number of hours spent in social
media.
 REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE AND STUDIES

FOREIGN LITERATURE

Alhusban (2016), stated that modern technological tools are redefining modern
writing and writing skills. Students nowadays are “changing the nature of the English
language” and relying on technology to “fix” all their writing. This trend has introduced
new forms of language, in which students use abbreviated words, combine numbers,
letters, and symbols to stand for specific words, as well as neglecting the grammatical
and syntactic rules of correct English.

Bouchibi (2018) classified the difficulties in writing into three: The first classification
includes the linguistic problems caused by the necessity to compensate for the
absence of certain devices that the spoken medium has, such as pitch and intonation,
through a clear and correct expression of ideas.
The second category, he calls psychological, stems from lack of interaction and
feedback between the student as the one who writes and the teacher as the reader:
there is a physical absence of a reader.
The third category involves cognitive problems due to the fact that unlike speech
which can develop in a natural way, writing requires formal instruction to develop. For
a clearer picture of the difficult nature of the act of writing, a comparison between
writing and speaking on one hand, and writing and reading on the other hand, will be
of great help.

Based on Yahoo Small Business (2013), the most common errors social media
brings are: grammar and spelling, writing too fast and using text language. Grammar
and spelling are most important in school, but mistakes are acceptable in social media.
Writing too fast increases errors and give less time to think. Abbreviations that are 8
common in social media are frowned upon in formal writing. Students must spell words
completely and not use “text speak” or slang.

Purcell, Buchanan & Friedrich (2013), teachers shared some concerns and
challenges in teaching writing in today’s digital environment among them are: an
increasingly ambiguous line between “Formal” and “Informal” writing and the tendency
of the student
s to use informal language and style in formal writing assignments, the general cultural
emphasis on truncated forms of expression, which some feel are hindering students
willingness and ability write longer text and to think critically about complicated topics
and last is the challenging “digital tool as toy” approach many students develop in their
introduction to digital tools as young children.

Chepkemoi, Dr. Situma & Dr. Murunga (2018), the uses of social media had
disadvantages when it comes in learning English writing particularly in using
Facebook. The students learn to use informal in academic writing because they were
exposed to some words that was abbreviated. They also stated that an excessive use
of social media will lead to addiction.
LOCAL LITERATURE

Arellano & Gemora (2015) stated that it is highly essential for the teachers to focus
on the spelling and vocabulary of the students, more activities involving reading and
writing such as reading of the selections like paragraphs, poems, stories; and let the
students explain what they are about and summarize the selections or list down words
that are not yet familiar to them and find the meaning of it. They may also have a
vocabulary enrichment activities or 10-item spelling tests to lessen the number of 9
students who are poor in spelling.

Sebastian, Cayao, and Asuncion (2013), stated that the students should learn to
write clear and straight-forward sentences. It is for them to easily get their message
across. In this way, communication will never cause misunderstanding.

There are some positive and negative impact of the social media and networking
sites. One of its positive impact is that it unites people on a huge platform for the
achievement of some specific objective while the negative impact is that it leads to
addiction. Another is that social media encourages poor grammar usage and spelling
as stated by (Torrevillas, 2017).

Based on the study of Rodrigo, Ph.D., Grosch, Ph.D.& Andres (2013), the results
showed that students are more inclined to use online resources such as Google, online
course material and literature, though there is still great appreciation for traditional
learning media such as books and printed handouts from teachers. Filipino students
seem to prefer self-learning, whether through traditional or non-traditional means, rather
than learning through social media.

Hechanova & Ortega-Go (2014), the results revealed that purposes or activities
using the Internet can be grouped into seven factors, namely basic Internet use,
entertainment, expression and interaction, e-commerce, school-related, and
technological deviance. Although the last three have been cited in other studies, they
have not been included in past taxonomies. Positive outcomes of Internet use are
greater productivity and personal enhancement. Negative outcomes can be described in
terms of social harm and Internet addiction. Results link specific usage with outcomes.
The use of Internet to express oneself and interact predicted both personal
enhancement and problematic Internet use. Basic Internet use and entertainment
predicted problematic Internet use. External regulation predicts personal harm and
social harm but not productivity and addiction. Self-regulation is associated with greater
productivity and personal enhancement and is negatively related to social harm and
addiction. Self-regulated was also a strongest predictor of both positive outcomes
suggesting that beyond putting in controls for Internet use, developing user’s ability to
self-regulate are more important in enabling the productive use of the Internet.
 FOREIGN STUDIES

Bouchikhi & Bouanani (2017), the study showed that most of the student’s used
Facebook as a means of communication. They mostly used abbreviation and emoji
when communicating with others and the number one reason is that they want to gain
time and for faster communication. Also, the result shows that academic writing can be
affected by texting in many ways. Some students agree that it can affect their
(capitalization, punctuation, spelling, verb tense, plural, and writing as when speaking).

Isaac (2019), the study reveals that most of the abbreviation that the students used
include the following; Contraction/ vowel deletion (jxt, tym, yh, frnd which means just,
time, yes, friend), Alphanumeric (4 which means for), Abbreviated forms (Tg for thank
God), Graphones (dis, dose, u, nafin, which means this, those, you, nothing, oh okay),
Shortening / reducing (il, wit which means will, with), Letter repetition to achieve
speech-like quality or lay stress (yhh, oo which means yes), and Clipping (exams for
examination).

Swan (2017), noted that the teacher’s biggest issue with social media is how it
impacts literacy skills like spelling and grammar. It stated that students now write and
talk the way they would text or tweet, using abbreviations, lack of punctuation, and
sentence fragments. Based on the study, the teacher, stated, “I had students do formal
written critiques of their performances, I was surprised at how many misspellings and
shorthand’s were used in their papers ("u", "nite," "@") and how conversational their
writing was ("Well, I thought...," "This was totally awesome" "Soo...," emojis, etc.).
They also struggled greatly with run-on sentences and comma splices across the
board. The teacher stated that, “this is a result of growing up with messaging and
texting.” Another teacher mentions, “They use poor spelling and grammar and made
up spelling so the words are short (u=you, ur=your/you're, etc.).”

Kamnoetsin (2014), study revealed the difference between writing on social media
(Facebook) and academic writing (on classroom). Although Facebook is set up for
academic purposes, students treated it as an informal learning place. The writing style
the students used on the tutorial lab via Facebook differed from the writing style they
used in the regular classroom, as evident in the finding that students used both types
(formal and informal) of writing on the online tutorial lab via Facebook, but in their
academic writing they only used a formal type of writing.

Nowadays, most of the students spend most of their time on social media and
spend less of their time in studying (El-Badawy & Hashem, 2015).
 LOCAL STUDIES

Based on the study of Belal (2014), 92% of teachers affirmed that SNS obviously has
an effect on writing. The quality of the writing is decreased. The students use simple
sentence in their writing and there are no good improvements in their writing. There are
no literacy writings and sometimes it is monotonous to read their writing. They use short
forms of words as ‘u’ for ‘you’, ‘by the way’ for ‘btw’ etc. and there are lots of spelling
mistakes because while chatting they don’t care about misspelling of words.

Mauban (2015), the study aimed to determine the use of weblogs as an alternative
writing platform. It showed that the pervasive errors committed by participant were
tenses, subject verb-agreement, prepositions, morphology, articles, verbs and
pronouns.

Morallo (2014), in his study entitled “The Effects of Social Networking Sites on
Students’ Academic Performance in Lyceum of the Philippines- Laguna”, that the usage
of social networking sites had no significant relationship on the students’ academic
performance. The study showed that there is significant positive relationship between
time spent by students on SNSs and their academic performance. It means that there
are other factors such as peers, study habit, behavior towards studying, and others
maybe the reason towards either positive or negative effects on the students’ grades
and not their involvement on social networking sites (cited in Año 2018).

Based on the study of Hashim (2019), the 5 common factors that affect the writing
competence of the students are the inside noise, outside noise, lack of stock of
vocabulary words, lack of sleep, and the poor of ideas which can be the reason why the
students cannot do their writing activity properly. However, there are some ways to
enhance the writing of the students such as writing an essay, read more story, knowing12
how to begin, writing a poem and learn the techniques in writing.

Belano (2018), in his study entitled “Difficulties in English Written Composition

among Grade-8 students of Gumaca National High School”, that the common difficulties
encountered by the students in English written composition was giving supporting detail
to the main idea. The component that affect the writing skills of the students is the
organization of the ideas which is the use of accurate sequence of sentences.