Styles and Trends of Online Aggressive Language among English Students in Their Blogging Activities
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Online aggression is a prevalent phenomenon among university students because information and communication technology (ICT) is an inseparable part of their daily and academic lives. University students are a demographic that is reportedly little studied. Previous research studied popular social networking sites rather than Blog, and online aggression is rarely studied through the lens of linguistics. Therefore, this study covered these research gaps by exploring the language tendencies of English students who are engaging in online aggression in Blog. The research design is triangulation mixed methods with two data types, i.e., 43 online questionnaire responses as the quantitative data and 302 online aggressive blog comments as the qualitative data. The questionnaire results were analysed based on the percentages and scale leanings, whereas the documented comments were analysed with content analysis assisted with NVivo 12. The results revealed that online aggression among university students who are blogging is primarily done with the style of combining text and non-text elements. The trends of their online aggressive language are lowercase spellings, no proper punctuation, and frequent usage of emoji to fulfil multiple purposes, i.e., syntactic as punctuation and semantic as discourse particle or emblem gesture. This study contributed in exploring the online aggression experiences of a unique demography, specifically the linguistic tendencies of university foreign language students who are interacting aggressively non-anonymously on a social networking site that is little studied.