Abstract

The world has seen the emergence of social media, and it has wider implications for all aspects of human life. This has consequently led to the emergence of research on various aspects of life such as knowledge, well-being and emotions. This research looks at how the frequency, quality and duration of Twitter use affect the English language communicative competence of Saudi higher education students. Communicative competence was estimated across four different measures: Linguistic, Discourse, Strategic and Sociolinguistic competence. Data was collected using self-administered questionnaire surveys with students studying in Saudi universities. Data were analysed using regression analysis. This research finds that the use of Twitter has a positive and statistically significant impact on all four aspects of communicative competence of Saudi higher education students. Keywords: Communicative competence, Twitter and communicative competence, Twitter and language competence, Linguistic competence, discourse competence, strategic language competence, sociolinguistic competence. DOI: 10.7176/NMMC/91-02 Publication date: June 30th 2020

Highlights

  • Social media has affected human lives in a very significant and noticeable way (Moran, Seaman and Tinti-Kane, 2011)

  • The main objective of this paper is to look at how the use of Twitter affects the ability of Saudi higher education students in communicating in the English language

  • Role of social media is very important in modern society

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Summary

Introduction

Social media has affected human lives in a very significant and noticeable way (Moran, Seaman and Tinti-Kane, 2011). While social media has eliminated many boundaries separating individuals, one of the key boundaries that still remain when people interact on social media is the language boundary. This boundary continues to affect people's ability to use social media networks. There is a wide distribution in the languages used by Twitter users with only 34% of Twitter users using English language, 16% Japanese, 12% Spanish, 8% Malay and 6% Arabic and so on. Despite the wide distribution of languages used, English remains one of the most commonly used languages on Twitter

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