A Study of the Impact of Social Media on ESL Undergraduate Students’ Writing Skills

Abstract

This study investigates the impact of social media use on the writing skills of undergraduate ESL students in a public-sector university in Lahore, Pakistan. Using a quantitative research design, data were collected from 42 undergraduate students through a five-point Likert-scale questionnaire adapted from previous studies. Descriptive statistics were employed to analyze the data using SPSS. The findings indicate that social media use has an overall positive influence on students’ English writing development, particularly in vocabulary acquisition, confidence building, and frequency of writing practice. However, excessive exposure to informal language and slang was perceived to negatively affect formal academic writing. The study concludes that social media can serve as an effective supplementary tool for ESL writing development if its use is pedagogically guided.