Social media apps are especially suited to being integrated into classroom instruction. These apps are especially valuable in Foreign Language settings, as they simulate person-to-person communication in many ways:
- are inherently interactive
- involve personal content that users are invested in communicating
- they are connected to users’ identities and sense of self
- learners get feedback on both the content and form of what they produce
- they are multimodal, blending the visual, textual, audio and video channels
Here is a presentation on this topic:
Social media language
Several of these social media applications will be reviewed here:
Facebook Messenger https://www.facebook.com/mobile/messenger
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Instagram http://www.instagram.com
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Pinterest http://www.pinterest.com
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RoadMovies (Available in iTunes, a similar app called SnapMovie is available for Android)
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Twitter http://www.twitter.com
What it does: Twitter is a social network that allows its more than 100 million users to send 140-character “tweets.” Messages are grouped with the addition of hashtags. For example, if you search for #cutedogs, you will find all of the tweets with that hashtag along with pictures that users have attached. Multiple hashtags can be used as long as the tweet remains under 140 characters. Other users can also be tagged with the @ sign followed by their user name. Twitter is a social network in which, like other social networks, users can “follow” other users’ tweets, which are updated in the users feed in real time.
Cost/platform/device info: Free and available on all platforms and devices.
What language skills it covers: Vocabulary, reading, writing, discourse
Reviews/suggestions: Twitter can be leveraged for language learning by allowing students to read and engage with authentic texts of manageable length on topics of interest. Both receptive and productive tasks can be designed making it a multipurpose tool in the language classroom. It can also be an effective means of exploring cultures and communities of practice and support the development of cultural competence.
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