practice Final

HeeJin Shin
EAP 2
Writer’s Workshop
Practice Final
June 17, 2008


Bad effect of using chat


Have you ever talked with someone by using Internet chat? Nowadays the Internet is the most important supplier in our society. People can do everything in the Internet life, such as receiving information, doing work and becoming globalize. It helps our life become more comfortable. The chat community also belongs in the Internet society. Lee (2002) claims that recently most schools have a similar situation; teachers say that students’ homework was mostly written with shortened words, poorer capitalization and punctuation and strange character like &, $ and <3. It can bring some problems to society. In life, communication is important but if among people there is a communication gap, it produces a break in harmony between each generation. People should figure out how to chat with to children and how they can solve this problem.

The primary reason in that young students might have writing skill. In “The death of the sentence: is the writing on the wall?” the author states “Most prose that young people read nowadays, Yagoda says, is unedited – blogs, text messages and instant messages. Consequently, ‘the things that suffer most are spelling and punctuation. They put a comma, not a period, where there is a pause.’ ” (Weeks, 2008, para. 36). It also explains that young people have come to have grammatical problems in their writing skill. Actually, people have the essence of their own languages. If young people maintain their grammatical problems, after decades people will suffer form a communication problem.

In addition, in the United States, there are a number of international students how using chat influences their second language study. According to Almeida d’ Eca (2003), “Integrating chat in EFL/ESL can be powerfully motivating and bring enormous excitement to what is generally a difficult process – learning a language” (para. 3). It can be a helpful a way to learn a language; however, it can be a big risk because chat language is not perfect sentences. Practically, international students want to look more like a native speaker, but chat language has lots of hidden meanings so sometimes it might be hard to understand for the language learner.

It is very hard to figure whether chat is good or bad, but mostly it is close to a bad effect. It can be part of progress in communication. But that is not enough. If chat only produces more flexible communication that would be a good, but the problem is chat also produces confusion of communication.

References
Almeida d’ Eca, T. (2003, June). The use of chat in EFL/ESL. TESL-EJ. Retrieved June 16, 2008, from http://tesl-ej.org/ej25/int.html.

Lee, J. (2002, September). Nu shortcuts in school R 2 much 4 teachers. NY Times. Retrieved June 16, 2008, from http://tinyurl.com/5p7vtb.

Weeks, L. (2008, June 15). The fate of the sentence: is the writing on the wall?. Washington Post. Retrieved June 16, 2008, from http://tinyurl.com/6bp4kz.