Influence Of Social Media In The Performance Of Secondary School Students In English Language
[A CASE STUDY OF NSUKKA EDUCATION ZONE OF ENUGU STATE]

Statement of the problem

One of the factors that have been associated with the steady decline in the quality of Nigerian education system and the students they produce is the very fact that the system had in a recent time being with the wide range of educational laxity in the use of social media network. This worrisome, uncultured behaviours beside their influence among students also tends to cut across all strata of the school system both junior, senior and tertiary. It is now a common knowledge that most secondary school students not only possess Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, etc., accounts, but also that most of them are now addicted to the online crave of the moment (Oche & Aminu, 2010). With so many social networking sites displayed on the internet, many secondary school students are tempted to abandon their homework and reading times in preference for chatting online with friends more than their academics that disrupt the educational equilibrium in the use of English in our school system and even the society at large.  Some studies have found a drop in students’ grades and academic performance, and lack of time for studies as consequences of social media network participation (Banquil et al, 2009; Kirschner and Karpinski, 2010; Ndaku, 2013), which results in their poor performance in both internal and external examinations in the English language.  In Nigeria secondary schools today more especially in Nsukka Education Zone, there is a serious concern about the increase in social media network problems such as: wrong spelling, use of acronyms, waste of time and energy in chats, twitter, facebook etc. For instance, the students are used to short forms of writing words in their chat rooms; they forget and use the same in the classrooms. They use things like 4 in place of ‘for’, U in place of ‘You’, D in place of ‘The’, etc. This affects their class assessment and also most of them perform badly in English language in schools for they negatively turns to posting and accessing write-ups in distorted grammar and both leads to increase in grammatical errors, increase in wrong spellings, high rise of spelling distortions/corruption of words, high rise in use of slangs and street expressions. There is need for this distortions and anomalies to be corrected. Based on this foregoing, therefore, this study is designed to investigate the influence of social media network on the performance of secondary school students in Nsukka Education Zone.

Purpose of the Study

The purpose of this study is to assess the degree to which social media influence the senior secondary school students in Nsukka Education Zone of Enugu State. Specifically the study intends to:

1. determine how secondary school students in Nsukka Education Zone of Enugu State are addicted to social network and its influence on their academic performance.

2. ascertain how the use of social media positively influence their academic performance in their English language internal and external examinations.

3. find out how  the  social media network the students are exposed to, affect their correct use of the English language.

4. examine how the excessive use of social media network sites influence the secondary school students in Nsukka Education Zone of Enugu State in their reading and writing of good English grammar.