An Investigation into the Impact of Social Networks on Reading Culture among Undergraduate Students of Three Universities in North Western Nigeria.
Publication Date: 13/08/2024
Author(s): Sada Mohammed Bature (Ph.D.), Nasir Umar Abdullahi (Ph.D.).
Volume/Issue: Volume 7 , Issue 3 (2024)
Abstract:
The mounting decline in reading culture is Nigeria’s contemporary reality. However, one region where the situation increasingly degenerates is the Northern part of the country. In this part, students increasingly grow disinterested in extensive reading to boost their vocabulary power. Dejectedly, the University students, who as English Second Languages Learners (ESL), as well as Non-Native Speakers (NNS), in that English is their Second Language (SL) and which equally is the target language (TL), it is incumbent on them to acquire a minimum of 750 vocabulary (Cox head 2000) so as to listen, speak, write and read fluently; as a steeping-stone towards acquiring 2000 and more vocabulary (Nation 2001) to communicate in the language with a sensible degree of competence. These could only be acquired through extensive reading, which most of these students fail to turn as their daily and pleasurable companion. Take the the departments of English or Literature in the region for instance, where the reading culture ought to be the norm, and the students to be the reading models of the residue of students in other faculties in the universities, regardless of the course they study, substantial proportion of them would rather heavily depend on the secondary literature to the novels recommended to be studied by their lecturers rather than reading the primary texts. Don’t you think that the social media has been playing a gargantuan role in the reading retrogressive culture, thereby deterring the students to acquire the number of vocabulary much required by the students in question, which will boost their vocabulary power and poor level of English as well? The focus of this project is to investigate the impact of the social networks on reading culture among undergraduate students in three universities in North Western Nigeria namely: Umaru Musa Yar’adau University Katsina State, Bayero Unviversity Kano and Usman Dan’fodio University Sokoto. It uses questionnaire method to present an SPSS analysis to prove this phenomenon or otherwise in the region.
Keywords:
Reading Culture, Reading Habit, Social Networks, Undergraduate Students, Three North-Western Universities.
