New Literacy of Young People Caused by the use of New Media

Nowadays young people meet in chat rooms, seek and find friends on Facebook, and are available to engage via mobile phones anytime, anywhere. The authors therefore wished to examine: 1) their real literacy today 2) the influence of the amount of time spent on the Internet and mobile phones on students’ school achievements. The sample consisted of more than one hundred students in their final year of grammar school for native and foreign language (English and German) learners in three Croatian counties. The authors explored students’ writing in their school assignments and those written in their free time in new media with regard to the (non-) existence of elements of the language of new media (abbreviations, emoticons, etc.) as well as the time spent on the Internet and mobile phones and school achievement.