Abstract
The proliferation of social media platforms has fundamentally transformed how students communicate, raising significant concerns about its impact on formal English writing skills. This chapter examines the multidimensional relationship between social media language use and students' academic writing competence. Drawing on empirical studies, linguistic analyses, and pedagogical frameworks, the chapter investigates how features of social media communication—including abbreviations, emoticons, informal syntax, and code-switching—infiltrate formal writing contexts. Data from multiple research studies conducted between 2015 and 2024 reveals a statistically significant correlation between heavy social media usage and declining grammatical accuracy, syntactic complexity, and lexical diversity in student academic writing. The chapter also explores protective factors, including media literacy education, explicit grammar instruction, and teacher-mediated digital literacy programs. Findings suggest that while social media presents measurable challenges to formal writing acquisition, its integration into instructional practice—under careful pedagogical guidance—may offer compensatory benefits. This chapter contributes to a growing body of scholarship advocating for adaptive writing curricula that acknowledge students' digital communicative realities without sacrificing formal English standards.