Social media projects for boosting intercultural communication by means of learning English

Abstract

The paper is targeted to explore the intensification of communication among culturally diverse students by means of creating social media groups. In frames of the psycholinguistic experiment, Ukrainian and Chinese students were working together at detecting common, similar and distinct features in idioms from the Ukrainian, English and Chinese languages. They intented to decode the phraseological picture of the world of Ukrainian, English and Chinese. Participation in social media group enabled participants’ exchanging opinions and ideas in the process of learning English. Such intercultural interaction outlined the national-axiological characteristics of Ukrainian, Chinese and English, their outlook and behavioral patterns. Pedagogical observation and interviews with participants revealed that students, who participated in the social media project, learnt traditions, speech etiquette and social norms of other nations, fostered their English speaking and writing skills. It was noted that democratic, uncritical and open-minded style of communication in the social media group allowed participants to build informal cooperation, develop tolerance to fellow students, overcome self-doubt and get motivated to communicate with culturally diverse students.

Sustaining Formal and Informal English Language Learning through Social Networking Sites (SNS): A Systematic Review (2018–2022)

“…These thirty articles revealed that there are five groups of targeted subjects that are of interest to researchers. A significant sum of studies was performed on the tertiary education level learners with 19 articles contributing to the list [30,31,35,36,[38][39][40]43,45,46,[48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55]58]. Five articles were directed towards the response from educators [33,34,42,56,57].…”

“…Based on Table 4 below, it can be deduced that Facebook has received the most attention as a single SNS platform to determine the efficacy of SNS in English language learning. Five articles [36,38,41,49,50] have researched the assimilation of Facebook in formal English learning whereas only one article [42] employed Facebook for informal English learning. About a third of the total articles reviewed [29,35,37,39,40,45,46,48,[51][52][53]57] have not specified any SNS platform in the research, indicating that a lot of studies were done to investigate the influence of SNS as a whole on learning rather than just a single platform.…”

“…Only two articles integrated more than one platform into single research [33,56]. As a comparison between formal and informal learning, it can be deduced that researchers emphasized more on the relationship between SNS and informal learning [29][30][31][32][33]35,37,39,40,[42][43][44][45][46][47][48][51][52][53][54][55][56][57] (23 articles) rather than considering SNS as integration in formal learning [34,36,38,41,49,50,58] (7 articles).…”

“…Out of these articles, the majority of them [32,33,36,37,[39][40][41][42][45][46][47][49][50][51][55][56][57][58] recorded the language skills development as perceptions of participants engaging in activities like listening to interactive videos or voice notes, reading online contents either for vocabulary learning or entertainment, writing formal responses or texting their friends, exchanging voice recordings as well as calling their friends as part of speaking activities. Several other articles gathered their data by observing the participants' level of English language proficiency as they participate in SNS-mediated activities which form the basis of their claims [29,31,34,38,43,44,48,52,53]. Only a handful of researchers have conducted actual tests to verify the extent of how the extensive use of SNS in learning has affected the participants' English language skills development [30,54].…”

“…Whatsapp and Telegram prioritized interpersonal relationships through the exchange of dialogues [56]. Other benefits that correlate to the usage of SNS are the facilitation of social interaction among participants and other users [30][31][32][33]36,38,39,[41][42][43][44][45]47,[51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58] and the promotion of enjoyment and motivation in learning [36,42,43,[45][46][47][48][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58]. It is apparent from these studies that the use of SNS has improved the teaching and learning experience [33,34,38,43,[47][48][49][50][51]55,<...…”