Social Networks as Practical Classrooms: A Study of Language Change and its Impact on ELT

Abstract

 

Social Networks and Language Change are an important area of study in today’s world. The present study discusses the user friendly nature of Social Networks and how it is of interest to teachers and researchers as it exemplifies the Communicative Approach to the teaching of a language.  This study posits that social networks have not only changed the individuals’ linguistic behaviour but also made it easy for him/her to acquire facility in a language in a relatively short span of time.  The easy accessibility of these networks and their flexible language norms in diverse situations has initiated people into a language.  In the context of India it has been seen that the fewer the language norms a person is asked to follow the better s/he conforms to the interaction norm in the virtual community at first and in the society subsequently. Ben Zimmer (2009.Web)) in his Virtual Thesaurus writes that language in the forums like Twitter and Facebook changed the word “friend into a transitive verb to describe the act of adding someone to an online list of acquaintances.” and that there are a list of un-verbs which are redefining the English word formation rules such as ‘unfollow a post’ or ‘unlike an update’.Further the study explicates this phenomenon within a pragmatic framework which provides a set of rules governing conversation and the social use of language enabling a communicative approach to the teaching of language.

Keywords

• social networks, language change, communicative competence, grice’s conversational maxims, language teaching

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