Nowadays, several media use slang words in their advertisement or programmers such as MTV, internet, radio and TV show. Therefore, it is not surprising that high school students, and college students are familiar with slang and put slang in their daily conversation. Slang, however, is not included in our curriculum. That is, “Slang is not taught in school neither in native languages nor in second language” (Charkova, 2007, p.390).
A study by Anugrani (2008), who investigated the use of English slang among high school students, stat;ed that the majority of students are interested in knowing slang words, and use them in their daily conversations. Inspired by her research, the researchers investigate the familiarity with certain slang by taking four groups of students who were enrolled in the academic years 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009. The paper attempts to evaluate the assumption that the fourth-year students were more familiar with slang words than the first-year students. In addition, this research attempts to uncover the underlying reasons for the use of slang. It will also examine whether the preference is caused by culture, advertising, movies, song, or some other aspects. Due to the limited time and sources, this study only discusses 40 randomly selected slang words that are commonly used by native speakers of English. All the target participants chosen were only female students, because the number of male students was significantly smaller than that of female. Taboo slang were not included in this research. |