An Investigation into the Impact of Social Networks on Reading Culture among Undergraduate Students of Three Universities in North Western Nigeria

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, as English Second Language Learners (ESL) and which equally is the target language (TL), it is incumbent on the University students 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. 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 University Kano and Usman Dan’fodio University, Sokoto. It uses questionnaire method to obtain data regarding the perception of the students on the impact of social networks on their reading attitude. The data was analysed quantitatively and the results were presented in tables using an SPSS analysis to prove this phenomenon or otherwise in the region. Thus, research is purely quantitative. Findings of the research indicates that the traditional reading of printed texts has metamorphosed into digital reading through the internet more especially the social networks and this clears the way for acquiring new vocabulary by the target students of this study. Where there could be setbacks is the fact that the undergraduate students of these universities do not put the new vocabulary they increasingly generate into good use and which they ought to, so long as they want eschew vocabulary extinction. This is another challenge when newly acquired vocabulary is not frequently used by a second language learner.