Shepherd, R. P. (2015). FB in FYC: Facebook Use Among First-Year Composition Students. Computers and Composition,35, 86-107.

Summary of the Article

While students use Facebook on a daily basis, such as for writing comments or sending messages to groups, they do not find correlations between Social Network Sites (SNSs) and First-Year Composition (FYC) courses. Even though students are performing academic notions of rhetorical situation, audience awareness, and process writing when doing various writing activities on SNSs such as Facebook, they do not seem aware of it. Educators should consider employing SNSs as efficient tools in acquiring the aforementioned composition skills in FYC courses to help students transition into academic writing. The researcher gathered data through surveying 474 first year composition students about their Facebook use in his own institution through composition instructor’s email lists as well as outside of the institution through national listservs. The majority of respondents were enrolled in doctoral-granting institutions and all of them were enrolled in a FYC course.

Assessment

 One clear implication is that students actively utilize SNS for writing comments and messages. As many college freshman students have a hard time transitioning from high school writing to college level academic writing, Facebook is an effective tool that will intrigue students’ interest and introduce composition skills such as audience awareness and rhetorical situation. Interestingly, the research showed that the students who consider themselves to be good writers or love writing can see the connection between SNS and FYC. This data indicates that SNS could be interwoven effectively into FYC courses to help in transitioning to academic writing.   

Key Article Quotations

“In particular, studies developing knowledge transfer between digital spaces and the composition classroom could provide useful data on how skills students learn on SNSs might help them in first-year composition classes” (p. 93).

“Making students aware of the connection between Facebook and FYC may be a very positive step in helping to achieve this kind of transfer” (p. 93).

Annotated by

Giseung Lee (2018)