Online Social Media Applications for Language Teaching and Learning

Online Social Media Application in Language Teaching

Recently, the use of online social media application for language teaching and learning has increase rapidly. Social Media, the so-called Social Network as referred to in the relationship among users, are growing types of digital media. They emerge in various forms that bring people together as communities. The Social Media have played vital role for decades. The statistics show that about 20.6 million out of 66.7 million the Social Media has already been integrated into an informal education system.

Social media applications create a new community where teachers and students do not have to communicate by means of the traditional face-to-face classroom environment. The brand-new changing way of teaching-learning environment definitely brings many impacts. Obviously, in terms of language learning, online classrooms have a single most important benefit over the traditional ones: native instructors. Though grammatical rules and basic vocabulary can be learnt from a non-native speaker very well, for natural speaking skills, presence of a native instructor is a most valuable thing.

As real-life communication is largely different from what students see in books, the online space and real foreign people can actually do much for student’s language proficiency improvement. Constant availability of social and language networks, as well as their general efficiency, drive learners into their simple web interfaces where there’s always somebody waiting to meet a new friend. 

Personally, I have used facebook and edmodo as online media in learning. They are very useful, especially to submit and check students’ work when learning process can not conduct in face-to-face. By those online media, teacher can not only check students’ assignment but also give them feedback directly. They are really helpful.