Code Switching and Code Mixing on Social Media Writing Skills among University Undergraduates in Ekiti State, Nigeria

Abstract

The study investigated code switching and code mixing on social media writing skills of the University undergraduates in Ekiti State, Nigeria. The study investigated the level of code switching and code mixing among male and female undergraduates on social media writing and it also examines the influence of code switching and code mixing on social media writing skills among universities undergraduates in Ekiti State. The descriptive survey research design was adopted in the study. Multistage sampling procedure was used to select the sample. The first stage purposive sampling techniques were used to sample all the four university in Ekiti state. The second stage, proportional sampling technique was used to sample from of the four universities. The third stage simple random sampling techniques was used to sample undergraduates from each faculty in four universities. Questionnaire was used to collect data on the study. Section A focused on the demographic variables of the respondents such as name of university, faculty and level of study and undergraduate background. Section B was made up items to elicit information on code mixing and code switching undergraduates on social media writing skills. The reliability of the instrument was determined through test, re-test method and in doing this, the instrument administered on 20 respondents outside the sample twice within the interval of two weeks. The two responses were correlated and analysed using test re-test, which yielded a reliability coefficient of 0.73. The data collected was analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics. The descriptive statistics such as the frequency counts percentages and bar chart were used to answer research questions. Hypotheses 1 and 2 were tested using Pearson’s Product moment correlation; hypotheses 3, 4 were tested using t-test. All the hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance. Therefore, the University undergraduates should stick to the option of language they choose to use on social media and that code switching and code mixing should be used alongside with quotation marks to indicate deliberate use of other codes on social media to show compliance with syntactic rules guiding writing.