The use of twitter and facebook in teaching mechanics of writing to Arabic-speaking EFL learners
Date
2018Item Type
ArticleAbstract
This study aims to compare the effect of Twitter and Facebook in teaching 20 Arabic-speaking EFL learners L2 mechanics of writing in an attempt to determine which tool is more effective. We adopted the experimental design of a pre- and post-test to measure the participants' knowledge of English mechanics of writing before and after the treatment, which involved taking part in describing pictures on these two social media networks for two weeks. We divided the 20 participants into two groups: one used Twitter and the other used Facebook to complete the description task. We administered a 100-word essay task as the pre- and post-test to determine whether the use of Twitter helped the participants improve their knowledge of the mechanics of writing in English more than the use of Facebook or vice versa. The results revealed that the differences between the numbers of errors produced by both groups were not statistically significant even though the group that used Facebook produced a lower number of errors on the post-test. The subsequent semi-structured focus group discussion provided more insight into the answers of both groups on the post-test. The study concludes with recommendations for further research.
Author
Altakhaineh, Abdel Rahman Mitib
Aljallad, Majed Zaki