An Investigation into Ways of Using English in American Universities' Facebook Pages

Abstract

This study aims to analyze and investigate ways of English used in some famous American universities’ Facebook pages. Data for analysis were posts and comments in 2016, collected from official Facebook sites of five American universities, including Princeton University, Harvard University, Yale University, Columbia University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Based on theoretical viewpoints of Bodomo (2010) and Crystal (2006, 2011), the writer would like to present some newly developed linguistic features compared with that of Bodomo’s studies in terms of new forms, new trends of styles, grammar, pragmatics and vocabulary under the light of qualitative approach with the support of the quantitative one. The results show that innovative linguistic features are described from Bodomo’s studies not only retain in American universities’ Facebook communication in 2016 but also are developed into some new trends by two groups of factors – face-to-face communication habits and socio-technical affordances. Also, this research makes an effortful contribution to mapping out some trends of language change in digital media communication.