How has the growth of social media impacted on foreign language learning?
Monday, 9th November 2009
Social media such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter can provide language learners with new ways to learn and practise using foreign languages.
Language learners can use social media sites to practise reader languages they’re learning, to write comments in those languages, and to write their own material. You can also ask readers to correct your mistakes and comment on your usage. The length of tweets on Twitter is limited to 140 characters, but on other such sites you can write more. When you start trying to write in a foreign language you may struggle to put together a sentence or two, but with practise it will become easier, and on social media sites you can write as much or as little as you choose.
Recently there have been a number of reports about a singer from Scotland who has been teaching Scottish Gaelic on Twitter. The singer, Fiona J MacKenzie from Dingwall, starting posting Gaelic lessons, songs and podcasts not long after she joined Twitter and has built up a following of over 900 people since then. Fiona is not the only Twitterer to offer language lessons – other people are offering lessons in such languages as Spanish, Japanese, German, Arabic and Chinese.
The interface of Facebook and other social media sites can be set to a wide variety of languages. If you set it to a language you’re learning you will see that language every time you use it and absorb some useful vocabulary and grammar from it. For example, I have set Facebook and LibraryThing to Welsh so the site itself is in Welsh, and the emails I receive when people post comments or send me messages are entirely or partly in Welsh. This regular exposure to Welsh helps me to improve my knowledge of the language.
As well as giving you opportunities to practise your languages online, social media sites can help you to find people in your area who speak the language you’re learning, or are also learning it, and arrange to meet them face to face to practise using the language.
There are also many sites designed to bring language learners, native speakers and tutors together to help with the language learning process.
Social media sites offer plenty of opportunities to learn and practise using foreign languages and can be used as part of your studies. It would probably be quite tricky to learn a language be relying solely on such sites though.
Follow Cactus Language Training on Twitter :
http://www.twitter.com/cactusbusiness
http://twitter.com/cactuslanguage
http://twitter.com/cactustefl
Join us on Facebook :
http://www.facebook.com/cactuslanguagetraining
And we are on LinkedIn:
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?about=&gid=2291473
Tags: english, spanish, french, german, learning, italian, tailor-made, languages, language, language learning, spanishindependent, social networking, social media
Posted by Simon Ager under Attitudes to Language Learning,
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Posted by Simon Ager on 11/15 at 06:47 PM
Nice balanced article and worth a link I think...