Linguistic Behaviour in Social Networking Sites used as Academic and Educative Communication Tool1

The use of social networking sites in the academic community has become very popular in recent years, especially among students. Hence, new forms of interaction between students and between students and lecturers have arisen. Provided the importance of these new communication scenarios in higher education, in this paper we describe the methodology used to compile a corpus in order to consider the linguistic behaviour of undergraduate students in social networking sites in academic scenarios. Consequently, we will set the parameters which give representativeness to the sample—that is, size, population, thematic areas and, obviously, the balance among the different social networking sites used.