Unfortunately, such correspondence bears some negative aspects as well. That is why, a few months ago, I decided to conduct (what I initially thought) a small-scale research with the aim to explore to which extent social media discourse brings about side effects resulting in the negative transfer of informality, familiarity and incorrect language use in academic correspondence otherwise expected to be formal. To me it seemed that this transfer is very prominent in the email correspondence students conduct with their lecturers where informality and familiarity sometimes exceed the most basic conventions. Needless to say that the idea is a result of my personal experience, if not dissatisfaction.
A complete presentation of all the analysed examples as well as the results and data I came up with in the end would by far exceed the scope of this format. Let it suffice to say that I had to ask the editor to let me submit my article considerably exceeding the word limit suggested by the style sheet! Yet, I would like to state three conclusions I could draw from the research:
1. Students tend to transfer the conventions of more lenient and permissive social media discourse to the correspondence with their lecturers to a rather large extent.
2. Students seem to believe that otherwise respected conventions of academic correspondence are not necessarily applicable to social media discourse.
3. The final conclusion indicates that the negative transfer of social media discourse results in poor language performance.
Now, being in favour of CALL, I would be contradicting myself if I didn't turn these conclusions into some useful booster.
At this point I should state that I do not believe we can expect a high level of politeness and formality in our students' writing because it would take too much time to teach them, it might even be considered offensive, students might complain about teachers being rude and many other things. However, I firmly believe we could instruct them to send messages and emails that are fairly correct in terms of language and grammar. Hopefully, they will learn to pay more attention to their own writing and eventually they might submit better essays and papers. Hopefully.
The most obvious point to start at would be to encourage them to turn on the automatic spellchecker integrated in all word processing programs as well as in most email services. I believe that would be an enormous leap in the right direction.
The second thing we could do is encourage them to read their messages, emails and posts before they hit 'enter'! There is a good chance they might see some obvious mistakes, maybe even realise that their writing lacks some formality and politeness. Eventually, they might develop a more responsible attitude to all their writing.
Regarding spelling and grammar, there are various online tools that can be used anywhere, for any type of writing and for any post. A simple copy-paste will suffice. In other words, when students use a word processing program, they should always check their writing for spelling and grammar mistakes. And when posting online, students should be instructed to copy their entire message into a spellchecker available online and at least correct the most cumbersome mistakes. Motst online checkers perform with a high degree of accuracy and speed. The final result will be at least a slight improvement of their written English.
One of such tools is Spellchecker by Reverso. Apart from the spellchecker, Reverso provides other checking options, such as translation, conjugation and grammar.
Grammar in individual sentences can also be checked with Grammar check for sentence. Here the user will be provided with a more detailed grammar check as the tool will underline words/ phrases/ structures in different colours suggesting different issues. Red is obviously the colour indicating an error!
Spellcheck plus offers a simple spelling and grammar check. Errors are indicated and corrections are suggested immediately. A good thing about this tool is that longer pieces of text can be pasted into the checking field.
The Spellcheck by Ginger is a bit more elaborate. Ginger corrects typos, phonetic mistakes, severe spelling mistakes and misused words based on the context of a sentence. A convenience provided by this tool is that it can be downloaded for free. Apart from the basic checking option, Ginger can translate, find synonyms, rephrase, etc.
Yet another tool available online is Polish my writing. It is very much similar to the Grammar check for sentence indicating spelling errors, grammar suggestions, or style suggestions in different colours. By clicking an indicated word or phrase, the user will be provided with more details, such as suggestions and corrections.
There are many other tools available online performing more or less the same thing. A general conclusion would be that the checkers should be used!
