The Future of Education

Over the past few years, Mobile learning approach received a great interest from researchers, experts, lectures and practitioners in the field of education in general and language learning in particular.  Recent research studies conducted in English language learning (ELL) showed that the use of mobile device; specifically smartphone, has significantly increased among college students because of its numerous social networking applications such Facebook messenger, WhatsApp messenger, Twitter,  Yahoo messenger, Blackberry messenger, Google talk, 2go messenger, Instagram, Skype, WeChat etc. For the purpose of this study, WhatsApp messenger is explored more deeply in relation to ELL purposes at the university setting.  The fact is that limited published academic research studies tackled the issue of WhatsApp usage on the performance of tertiary students in the context of Morocco. Given these concerns, the major aim of this study is to examine the effect of WhatsApp messenger on academic performance of Semester five (S5) students of the department of English of Meknes. To achieve this, 10 students from the department of English of Meknes were interviewed and 80 questionnaires were handed to students from the same department.  Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) version 21 was used to analyze collected data. The study revealed that a considerable number of the participants of this work reported that, the use of WhatsApp messenger affects their academic performance in both negative and positive ways. 

Keywords: Impact, WhatsApp, academic performance, S5 students, English department.