Theodore Bonnah; Mark Donnellan
INTED2017: 11TH INTERNATIONAL TECHNOLOGY, EDUCATION AND DEVELOPMENT CONFERENCE 3667 - 3675 2017年
[査読有り] This paper investigates the use of Twitter as writing tool in EFL classes at a Japanese university. Twitter has gained great popularity in Japan with over 25 million users (statista. com) and a Japanesefriendly interface which was introduced in 2008 (Mette, 2009). The researchers realized the potential for this popularity to be transferred into the EFL classroom leading to the current research. In this action research report of classroom Twitter implementation, students were assigned daily Twitter writing, which was well received by them, and which offered them a unique opportunity to practice English writing in an authentic manner yet non-judgmental manner on a routine basis. The researchers analyzed a corpus of Twitter data from their pilot program at a Japanese university. This corpus was compiled from tweets generated daily by low-level EFL learners using personal mobile devices, essentially an 'extensive writing' teaching approach that has students write often and freely, as opposed to traditional intensive writing assignments which are constrained by classroom times and limited to topics, formats and word counts chosen by the teacher. In addition to analyzing the statistical significance of grammatical and lexical features in a way commonly referred to as corpus linguistics, the authors also looked at socio-linguistic features, namely discourses of identity, authority and interaction. Specifically, we inventoried the times and length of their tweets for evidence of writing as a social practice, their use of multimodal literacies such as emoji, and the variation of pronoun use to see different discourses about their use. The findings were categorized into three major themes: 1) the discourse of writing practice, namely writing as life practice outside of school; 2) discourse of interaction, as evident in the Twitter-specific interaction of emoji use, which constitutes a discourse of new media English; and lastly, 3) discourses of identity reflecting the progression from Japanese L1 self and English L2 self, as evidenced in pronoun use and fossilization of errors. We found that the analysis offers insights for EFL pedagogy, and for the integration of technology in the classroom. Additionally, it offers possibilities for further linguistic and/or social science research into the use of Twitter in the classroom.