Term paper

From tweeting to teaching: how EFL teachers can use twitter as

 a powerful resource in the classroom

By

Najlaa S. Al-Ghamdi

434822012

MA Candidate, King Khalid University

Supervised by

Dr. Abdulaziz Fageeh

December 2014

Abstract

Many are now keen on using the varied social network media as learning and/or  teaching tools. Significantly, the Saudi culture has modified as a result of online distribution of ideas which has has become so familiar.Our students’ needs have transformed as they develop their digital skills. The most popular social network  is Twitter where teachers and students can use it for communication and conversation so they can keep the in-class discussion going on after class. This is consistent with the fact that second/foreign language learning needs to be acquired and maintained regularly. Most EFL learners would apply some grammar rules and expressions in chatting using the medium of Twitter. Twitter can also provide EFL learners with the opportunity to practice the target language easily and off-hand, and therefore, it has been treated as a microblogging medium. As a teacher of English as a foreign language, the writer has chosen to search how much Twitter, as the most popular social network in the society, can help the EFL learners to improve their vocabulary. Methodologically, in this paper,Twitter was used as a microblogging tool in a non-native English speaker’s course where the instructor exchanged structured tweets with six participants from different levels and cultures. They would share messages and texts daily. The texts would be saved and analyzed day by day.  The participants would be asked to follow all the messages that belong to the whole group lexically, morphologically, and syntactically. Results indicated the effectiveness of this medium in helping learners to grow linguistically in a more communicatively effective way.

Key words: ESL, microblogging, language learning, communication

 Introduction

Twitter is considered the most popular social network that people use every day. However, second language learning is considered the knowledge that needs to be obtained and maintained regularly. Vocabulary is an important element in second language learning and teaching as what Hatch and Brown stated (1995), that vocabulary is the foundation to build languages, which plays a fundamental role in communication. By definition, Twitter is a social network in which everyone shares their current activity by answering the question “What are you doing?” This form of social interaction skill is called microblogging.

“Microblogging tools enable users to post short messages from their mobile devices, a Web page, from Instant Messengers and desktop clients. The same channels are used for receiving messages”. (SabujKundu is Founder & CEO of Codeboxr, 2010)

Twitter seems to be an ideal tool that can be used to support learning English, especially via chatting. Kerstin Borau, Carsten Ullrich, Jinjin Feng, &Ruimin Shen (2009) pointed out some reasons about the advantages of twitter in learning English. First, Twitter is easy to be used everywhere, so the learners can send and receive messages any time either on the computer or the mobile phone. They can also decide how much time they spend writing and reading these messages so this is an important point for busy learners. Second, Twitter is suitable for any level of English because the students can write and choose a topic and grammatical structure which is suitable to their level. Third, using Twitter as an online learning community can help learners who could not learn language through courses to share and integrate into the community.

          In this study as an instructor, I created a new personal Twitter account and pass some texts gradually in length. Such it would be very simple, clear and direct; “What are you doing? Then collect different responses from the participants. Later, it would be longer and need a detailed answer; “What did you do yesterday?” and similarly, collect the responses from them. By the end, there would be a free discussion between the participants and under supervision from the instructor to measure how much vocabulary and expressions, how they use tenses perfectly, and how they communicate easily or with some troubles. The learners of this account are prompted to contact and communicate with each other as friends where each user receives the messages of his or her friend and try to post at least seven microblogging messages a week and to read the received messages of their friends. As an instructor, I would pass indirectly some sentences that have some grammatical rules, and some tweets as forms of formal and informal spoken language. After introducing the setting of our Twitter case study in methodology, the data would be analyzed to explore to which extent that using Twitter can benefit language learning, plus studying the positive influence on direct motivation.  By the end, there would be discussion of the related work and a final conclusion.

The purpose of this research is to show the correspondence between social networks and languagelearning through using twitter as a powerful resource in your classroom, to promote the idea of self- autonomy of the students to use their second language through expressing ideas and conveying messages in English tweets to be read popularly by Twitter users around the whole world and finally to emphasizes the importance of creating technological channels of interaction between the teacher and the students to support connectives,  the universal idea of current learning.

Literature review

To define Twitter,  Mischaud (2007) stated that

"Twitter is a web-based communications platform combining Instant Messaging and SMS that enables subscribers to its service to send short ‘status updates’ to other people. Beyond its hybrid platform, Twitter’s unique feature is its overarching question “What are you doing?”, which acts as a ‘guidance note’ on how users should phrase their postings"

Twitter, as a kind of microblogging, offers the opportunity for foreign language learners use the language they are trying to learn in their actual situations.Microblogging is a newer form of blogging that allows the users to publish online brief text updates which is usually less than 140-200 characters and they can also post an image. (Lamy & Hampel, 2006)

         Twitter is considered to be one of the best known microblogging services which enables their learners to create a real- time interaction. There are also many blogs having Twitter usage and applications as central topics .Each user can monitor the notes of other users and can become a Follower for them. (Dervin, 2009)

There are some pragmatic issues such as the advantages, the disadvantages and the logistics of using twitter as an educational tool. These issues have been deduced from the review of relevant literature and of my own experience with chatting in a private group community.  In addition,  exploring collaborative writing as Tweeted texts  can enhance  writing as a fun activity,  foster editing phases, develop literacy skills, and above more,  they can give the learners an opportunity to revise  their cognitive trails.  In addition, it is very beneficial for the reader response as learners using tweets to send out observations and questions to the group while engaged in group activities. (Macaro, E. (1997)

Finally, Twitter is a very helpful tool for assessing opinion,organizing ideas, reflecting and sending notes, managing meet-ups, promoting serendipitous discovery, looking for outlying ideas etc. (Gabriela Gosseck, Carmen Holotesu, 2007).

One of the recent studies was conducted by Creswell (2007) to show how to use twitter in the classroom. The sample was drawn from college students where the instructor applied some socialized and educational conversations plus some questions (Creswell, 2007).The study showed how potential participants functioned to increase the circle of socialization.  Other research showed that instructors shared with each other their tweets to provide a wide variety of questions and expressions through chatting and revealed improvements in the writing skills, communicative language learning and enhanced attitudes to EFL (Marissa, 2013; Caruso, 2012; Eleta Mogollon, 2014; De Larreta-Azelain, 2013; Cheng, 2012).

Twitter could be used in an academic setting to create  an interaction environment  about a specific topic (Eleta Mogollon, 2014; De Larreta-Azelain, 2013). Twitter can be used as an educational tool  between teachers and students, students and students in the same class, students and students in another country, for the entire class or for pair/group work (Cheng, 2012). Ezra Harmandaoglu (2012), summarizes the qualities that make using Twitter in language learning is valuable. These qualities are relevance, quickness, distinct style and twitter's chatty way. 

Methodology

The methodology applied in this study is an interactive case study, grounded in a new account on twitter which has been launched on 26 of November, 2014; this is called “Tweet and learn”. As the instructor, the researcher invited some of the participants to be followers. They were six participants from different cultures and language standards. The participants are (Ms. Narges; 38 years, a Science teacher), (Ms. Reema, 29 years a housewife), (Dr. Atheer, 19 years a medical student),( Dr. Nada, 22 a dentist student), (Al- bandary , 16 years a secondary student), and (Saleh, 14 years an intermediate student). They have to share tweets daily. It’s supposed to be tweets for a week. The instructor would pass some questions and comments through tweets, pick up the responses, and analyze them.

The main idea of this application is to get a real background and thesis to be applied in the classroom later. The hypothesis of this study is formulated as follows:

“By free and warm socializing among both students and teachers, students would be more fluent in the spoken language, the shy ones could overcome their troubles with face-to-face conversations, in addition, and teachers could supervise students indirectly to use grammar rules perfectly plus passing some specific questions to give their students to chance to use tenses easily.”

The participants are added. Some of them started to share. On the first day, Ms. Narges started with “ Hi. Ms, Naglaa.” She is a Science teacher in an international school. She has a good communication in her daily life. But she is very busy, she shared very little. She shared well on the first day through few tweets such” How are you?”, and “What about you?”.

I sent a welcoming message for all participants such “How are you?”, the answers were:

Saleh said :” I am fine. What about you?”

Al bandary said:, “ Fine, thank you.”

Dr. Nada said :” Not good. Thank you.”

Dr.Atheer replied after 3 days saying: “Good. What about you?”

Mrs. Reema does not reply.

On the same day at night, The instructor passed a question such “Describe yourselves in some words.” But no one replied. May be they were busy with exams.

So I passed another question on 30 of November, “ What did you do yesterday?”

Ms. Narges said: “ I visited my  best friend.”

Dr. Atheer replied, “ I went to the garden.”

Saleh said, “ I studied the religion subject.”

Ms. Reema said,: I am always busy with my baby at home.”

Dr. Nada said, “I went to the mall and bought a dress.”

Then I put another question about the future, “What do you plan to do next weekend?”

Dr. Atheer said:” I will meet my friend and you?”

Al- bandary said:” Study hard for my exam.”

Saleh said” I well go with my friends.”

On the first of December, I asked “ What are you doing now?”

Dr. Atheer tweeted,” I’m studying Histology.”

Mrs. Reema appeared by little words, “ As usual busy with baby.”

Saleh tweeted, “ I’m watching YouTube.”

Al-bandary said, “ Answer you with lovely animation” ”Just kidding”

On the third of December, I tried to push them to share socially on a free topic. So, I asked them, “What does freedom mean to you?”  “Is it to be free from any constraints and responsibilities?”

Al- Bandary said:” Live in paece and not to be under control that can reduce my ambition.”

Saleh said,” It’s to make anything without controlle.”

Dr. Atheer said, “ Freedom means enjoy ur weekend without any studying force.”

Ms. Narges finally appeared,” Freedom is to know what you want to do, when, and how?”

On 5, December, there weretwo passing questions;

 For the present action, “ What do you plan to do today?”

Saleh said:” I well make a BBQ with my friend.”

Al- Bandary replied, “Support my sis in her project.”

Dr. Atheer said, “ Today I and my colleagues will present our medical project in Asdaf Mall. Hope to share us.”

For their attitudes and dreams, “What should you do to be a successful person?”

Saleh said,” I should to study hard.”

Dr. Atheer replied, “Studying hard and purposive planning are the first steps to be successful.

Al- Bandarysaid:”be hopeful and don’t allow anyone to foil you.”

On 6 of December, I passed a specific question; “ What is your favoritehobby?”

Saleh hurried and shared, “the swim.”

All tweets are copied as they were written on twitter, so some have spelling mistakes and the others could have wrong structures.

According to the mentioned idea above, I recommended to be applied in a class in the intermediate stage. My friend, Ms. Ibtehal, an English teacher, works in Al Rewad intermediate school. She has started to apply this idea in her class for one week. The class is about 20 girls. They are in the second prep. Year. She launched an account on Twitter. She started to meet her students and passes some puzzles in English. Then she started to put some questions and encourages them to share and answer by rewarding them in the following day. Motivation stimulates most of the girls even the weak one in the English language to share and be one of the cooperative group. As her comments, both enjoy with each other and most of lazy girls change their attitudes.

The following research questions were posed:

1-Does following English twitter accounts have an impact on improving the vocabulary of EFL learners?                                                                                        

2-To what extent does English tweeting can help EFL learners to improve their language?

3-How can we exploit Twitter in second language instruction and increase its effectiveness?                                                                                                                

Data analysis

 After about one week of communication with friends from different cultures and backgrounds, it’s obvious that using new means of technology among learners especially the young ones is so effective. It may achieve higher grades than any means else.

However, it’s so hard to direct the learners indirectly, perhaps, they didn’t get on with, or they may get bored. So the instructor should be wise with them. It’s important to use various and diverse methodologies with them.

Based on this simple and small study, the learners’ responses differ from one to another regarding to the individual differences, their habitual life, and their life style. Generally, they communicate in English very well, although some were not active enough.

There are some important factors that affect their content of language acquisition; it can be summarized through the analysis of each participant:

Saleh, a prep student, is the youngest participant. He is about 14 years old. He is Saudi boy. He used English well. He passed messages every day. But he didn’t recognize his repeating spelling mistake in the word “will”, as he wrote it as “well”. In addition, he always uses simple sentence and sometimes uses short answer. He never uses conjunctions. I think it relates to his age and usual youth tones.

Regarding Al-bandary, she is a secondary student. She uses English well. She writes more. Her sentences are longer and always have conjunctions. In the beginning, she had troubles with sentences and the form of verbs.  But, by the end she responses to correct her verbs without any directing, only her strong and good observation of my sentences, as on purpose, I replied her immediately in a similar sentence and tense to imply that there’s a mistake.

Ms. Reema was a special case. She is a Syrian house wife. She has a little baby. She didn’t share a lot. But when she shared, she used English well.

Ms. Narges is a Science teacher in an international school. She uses English a lot in her work. She shared not too much as expected. But, she shared in a good way, she used English well, although most of her expressions were spoken language more than is written. I think it relates to her work style, perhaps she always uses informal language with students. So she has the same path in tweets.

Dr. Atheer, is a medical student. She was so cooperative. She shared every day. She answered most of questions in details. She has good communication. She was very careful with spelling and structure. She replied efficiently to any modifications through the speech. She used different tenses easily.

Dr. Nada is a student dentist. She was so nice. She shared perfectly. She used greetings and responses very well. Although she has some troubles with sentence structure, she has higher and faster reaction towards any supervisions or comments.

Based on the feedback of my friend, Ms. Ibtehal, students were so enthusiastic towards tweets every day. They considered it as a task. They compete in comments and writing sentences in a good structure. In her own words: “ I surprised that we explained a rule in the class, then on the same day, five girls wrote different sentences in tweets as an application on this grammar rule.”

She added, “It was an amazing influence of tweeter with my students’ level.”, “I felt it’s better than any sheet you did in the class to check their achievement.”, and “ I hope if such as methodology is applied widely.”  She also informed me those students’ awareness increases and their attitudes inside the class changes a lot especially for the lazy ones.

Generally, it’s proven that using modern technology can help learners make progress with their learning indirectly while using computers and internet programs keep language acquisition is easier and more perfectly communicative media. I think it can be applied with younger learners as they are always interested in computer mediated programs especially social networks. In addition, their attitudes to look like the adult would be as a stimulus for their awareness and response. As well, if some pronunciation exercises and phonetic rules pass indirectly, it would produce a good impact on both the learners and the instructors. Above more, Twitter would be effective and perfect for the students in university as professors could communicate with their students and assess different pages to discuss the current issues as a means of open speech and discussions. In this way, they could pass any instructions or notes indirectly and in a nice way.

Discussion

The purpose of this research is to show the correspondence between social networks and language learning through using twitter. It’s considered as a bridge to link language learning with current lifestyle. As twitter is considered as one of the most widely spread social networks. Your tweets can be read everywhere and at any time, so using it as a means of learning the language could be a way to link between native speakers and second language learners. In addition, it could give the opportunity for the learners to get the accent and speak fluently with less effort.

Regarding to the educational side, it would change completely the kind of relation and communication between both the teacher and the students. It would help the teacher to stimulate more students to participate and love the new language.  So I recommended and suggested if tweets would be applied as an external activity that’s complementary to the curriculum. So students would take it as a nice task or as a type of daily chat, but not in their mother tongue.

In other words, Students would use their second language in their daily life indirectly, which may lead to use it as native ones, plus they would express and share their ideas and thoughts widely which is very helpful to get brainstorm in a nice and wise way. There is no doubt that social network plays an important role in our daily life in many fields such political, social, and economical. So it’s essential to get more benefits of it in the educational and cultural section. As learning a new language as a gate to other countries, cultures, habits, and traditions. It’s as a new world you join it with a good guide such tweets.

Conclusion

           As it’s mentioned before,” Microblogging is an unusual form of expressing oneself, yet it is rapidly becoming a mainstream tool. Not only does its popularity make it relevant to language learners, its conversational and concise style offers opportunities to practice specific language skills”.(Avatar Languages and Avatar English,2011).Twitter is a microblogging tool. It has a combination of different features of SMS text messages and blogs. It provides a chance for the users to send tweets to each other that are also readable by the rest of the web. Since the conversations are public, there can be a comfortable flow of text between various users, assuming that they all are following each other.

         Using Twitter in learning the language has been just like a discussion forum through passing some questions or showing some topics for replying and sharing in a specific account such as a discussion board. Twitter is so perfect as it can be used anywhere and whenever the participants want to send tweets.

        Although participants were so active and cooperative, they faced some troubles with using well the tenses and applying in a complete sentence. The data analysis identified some themes of the factors that affect the participants’ responses based on their backgrounds, cultures, and their educational standards. This paper describes the positive effects of tweets during a whole week as they were so interested and enthusiastic which would play an important role in language acquisition. It showed how the cultural competence and studying as an activity through social networks would have a positive influence on direct motivation especially on application in the classroom. In addition, It clarifies how self- autonomy of the students in the classroom could use their current language vocabulary and expressions to offer their ideas, thoughts, and attitudes. It indicated also how their lifestyle, especially with younger students could be modified to be an attitude in language acquisition.

          Finally, Twitter proved to be an effective tool for professional development and for collaboration with students so it can be used  by product activities or it can easily be mixed with other classroom or homework tasks which mean it can be applied widely through many educational sectors. It is a means for keeping  students in contact, to support their fluency in communication and to focus on conciseness and accuracy through following conversations, following others, tweeting in a communitytwitterature, feedback of their tweets by correcting time by time, and using a parallel conversation in class.

Pedagogical implications

The study provided the following educational implications for EFL pedagogy:

1.      Creating accounts for the courses to be available for the students where the teachers post anything related to the course and communicate with their students before and after the classes.                                                                                                

2.      For the beginners such as level 1 and 2, teachers can create an account to improve their English and encourage them to tweet in English and use their new vocabulary .

3.      The teachers can cooperate with his\her students to create hashtags in English about exciting topics to be discussed weekly generally by twitter users.

4.      The teachers can make competitions between his\her students through twitter to attract them to tweet in English.

5.      Tweeting can be used inside and outside the classroom. So, it connects students to their courses even if they missed some of their classes.                                                

6.      A project can be developed by the EFL teachers and learners to create an application for English language learning, with the cooperation of Twitter.com,  to be downloaded as any application onto the smart devices.                                                  

References

( 1 ) Al-Khalifa, H.S.: (2008) Twitter in academia: a case study from Saudi Arabia. eLearn. (9), 1–1 (2008)

( 2 ) Brown, G., Yule, G. (1999 )Teaching the spoken language. Cambridge Language Teaching Library

( 3 ) Canale, M., Swain, M. ( 1980 ) Theoretical bases of communicative approaches to second language teaching and testing. Applied Linguistics 1, 1–47

( 4 ) Caruso, G. (2012). French Language Legislation in the Digital Age: The Use of Borrowed English Telecommunication Terms and their Official French Replacements on Twitter and in the American Foreign Language Classroom. Doctoral dissertation,  Minnesota State University, Mankato, ProQuest, UMI Dissertations Publishing, 2012. 1517227.

( 5 ) Cheng, H. (2012). Applying Twitter to EFL reading and writing in a Taiwanese college setting. Doctoral dissertation, Indiana State University, ProQuest, UMI Dissertations Publishing, 2012. 3539349.

( 6 ) De Larreta-Azelain, M. (2013). Learners' attitudes toward collaborative writing in e-language learning classes: a twitter project for German as a foreign language. Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada 26 (2013): 127-138.

( 7 ) Eleta Mogollon, I. (2014). Multilingual use of Twitter: Language choice and language bridges in a social network. Doctoral dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park, ProQuest, UMI Dissertations Publishing, 2014. 3628754.

( 8 ) Grosseck, G., Holotescu, C. (2008) Can we use Twitter for educational activities? In: 4th International Scientific Conference eLSE eLearning and Software for Education

( 9 ) Honeycutt, C., Herring, S.C. (2009) Beyond microblogging: Conversation and collaboration via Twitter. In: HICSS 2009: Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, pp. 1–10. IEEE Computer Society, Washington

( 10 ) Kellogg, W.A. ( 2002) Position paper: Social coherence in computer-mediated conversation. In: Discourse Architectures:Designing and Visualizing Computer Mediated Conversation. A workshop at CHI 2002.

( 11 ) Marissa, D. (2012). Intertextuality, identity works, and second language literacy development in the digital media: An ethnographic case study of two Indonesian college students' literacy practice on Twitter. Doctoral dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park, ProQuest, UMI Dissertations Publishing, 2013. 3611936.