The Role of Social Media in Foreign Language Teaching (original) (raw)

Sosyal medyanın yabancı dil öğretimindeki yeri (The role of social media in foreign language teaching). In H. Yılmaz; E.Yücel; S. D. Üğüten & F. Şanal (Eds.), Farklı yönleriyle yabancı dil öğretimi (Foreign language teaching with various perspectives)

The importance of technology in our lives has been increasing day by day and the use of technological tools for educational purposes has become an undeniable reality. More and more integration of technological tools such as computers, tablets and smart phones together with internet eased the utilization of those in foreign language teaching.The number of mobile applications for foreign language teaching has been increasing and especially social media has become an indispensable part of students' lives. Grahl (2013) divides social media into 6 despite the fact that the boundaries among them are not clear-cut: 1) social networking sites (Facebook, LinkedIn etc.), 2) social bookmarking sites (Delicious, StumbleUpon, etc.), 3) social news (Digg, Reddit, etc.), 4) media sharing sites (Instagram, YouTube, etc.), 5) microblogging sites (Twitter, etc.), and 6) blogging and forum sites.This review of literature study focuses on Facebook out of many social networking sites, Twitter as one of microblogging sites, blogging and finally podcasts as one of media sharing tools. The main objective of the present study is to prove the role and importance of aforementioned four social media tools in foreign language teaching by presenting studies conducted in Turkey as well as in other parts of the world. By demonstrating the benefits of those tools in a tabular form, the researchers also target to pave the way for further studies on social media.