Does Social Media Gives Help to English Proficiency?

PATRICIA ANNE B. IBAY, LPT

In this age and era, social media has taken a big part of our lives, students nowadays can’t take off their hands and eyes on their mobile phones and this has an effect on English Proficiency.

Students are the ones who are mainly affected by the growing influence of social media, they browse their social media accounts like Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter. They see a lot of posts everyday with English captions and contents, if they are not that proficient in English they cannot spot the wrong grammar contents on Facebook that were posted by their friends, and because of the great influence of social media, they easily believe that all posts and content are grammatically correct where in fact they are not.

With the use of social media, some teachers are imparting knowledge like grammar rules and other English topics, and this gives a big help to everyone who wants to improve their English proficiency.

Even so, there are some social media influencers teaching wrong grammar rules and students still believe them for they are influencers and they have a lot of followers.

A lot of students can speak and write in English but not everyone is proficient in it. Studying and memorizing grammar has no effect if it will not be used or applied in a correct way.

In consideration of that, they should also practice applying these on their social media accounts while posting and chatting, in this way they can improve their English proficiency.

As a result, social media does give help to English proficiency but also it worsens a lot of students' literacy and proficiency in English, even so everyone should be careful of what they post and see on social media for not everything is right.