Student’s Speech Act in Facebook Status

Authors: Angelo Lahina (La Patria College, The Philippines)
Speakers: Angelo Lahina
Strand: Applied Sociolinguistics
Session Type: General Session

Abstract

Since Language is a primary and an inseparable part of one’s daily life, this study explored how Grade 11 senior high school students used Facebook as a way of communication and expression of one’s self. Thus, we used Facebook as the object of this research through the analysis of Facebook statuses applying J.L. Austin’s Theory (1975). People do not only produce utterances which are confined in linguistic grammatical structures and words, but also they often perform actions using those utterances. Acts performed behind the production of a particular utterance are called speech acts.

The study analyzed the status updates posted by Grade 11 senior high school students from La Patria College formerly Patria Sable Corpus College using the Speech Act Theory proposed by Searle in order to identify the common topics and the prevalent types of speech acts found in the status updates of high school students.

The relationship of the speech acts to the profile of the respondents like age, strand, and socio-economic status was also identified. The result of the study showed that most of the students shared about their sentiments about feelings of love, sympathy, kindness, and etc. The findings also revealed that assertive was the most prevalent speech acts in the status updates. Moreover, the study found that there was no significant relationship between the speech acts and the profile of the respondents.

Keywords: Facebook status, Speech acts, Speech acts theory