Engaging Turkish Learners in Digital Participatory Culture Through Social Media?Enhanced Language Instruction

Abstract

Research has shown that social media can provide valuable tools for L2 teaching and learning, particularly for developing learners’ informal learning of non-academic interactional registers, socio-pragmatics, culture, and multiliteracies. However, the fact that their benefits are more pronounced in informal contexts due to their quotidian nature poses a challenge for incorporating them into formal language instruction settings. In response, we designed social media-enhanced instruction for 12 intermediate-level learners of Turkish as a foreign language at a large public American university. Learners were required to post tweets in Turkish and engage with both their colleagues and native speakers of Turkish on Twitter each week, writing biweekly journal entries about their experiences. A mixture of quantitative and qualitative data, consisting of learners’ journal entries, tweets, and the projects they developed as part of the instruction, were collected before, during, and after instruction and then analyzed using grounded qualitative techniques. The findings provide insight into how Turkish learners can engage in various social media literacy practices, developing awareness of everyday Turkish cultural discourses and language uses. The findings highlight the potential of social media-enhanced language learning as a means to engage in digital participatory culture.