Potential of Twitter in Post-reading Activities Among Community College Students in Malaysia

Abstract

Since its introduction in 2006, many studies have been made on the use of Twitter as learning tool especially in language classrooms. These studies, however, tend to look at the use of Twitter as language learning tool in the school, college or universities and rarely in the community college environment. Although it is one of the higher education institutions in Malaysia, community colleges do have vast differences with other institutions in terms of students’ educational background and learning motivation, lecture duration and semester, mission and vision and lecturer expertise. Thus, this paper describes a survey study using a Fuzzy Delphi method to investigate the potentials of using Twitter for post-reading activities among Malaysian community college students. The main focus of this study was to get experts’ consensus on the future of Twitter and its usage in language learning in the future for community college students. Experts consisted of experienced community college English lecturers and curriculum developers and academic specialists from the Community College Department, Ministry of Higher Education. Findings indicated that low level of Twitter usage among lecturers and students make Twitter as a learning tool rather vague in the future. This article discusses the reasons behind the moderate level of Twitter usage and the direction for future research in implementing Twitter in the language learning classroom.