THE ROLE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN IMPROVING THE ACADEMIC ENGLISH WRITING SKILLS OF ARAB STUDENTS

Abstract

A striking feature of the 21st century is the technological innovations that interfere in linguistic study and in social practices based on contemporaneity, especially, writing and reading. These social practices are the target of major revolutions from technology and electronic supports, which provided the creation of a range of communicative networks in the virtual world, establishing an infinite communicative link between different cultures and generations. The use of such platforms and the way reading is used might be an improvement tool for teaching English in Arab schools, associating its use in social networks and methodologies to guide the appropriate use for this new knowledge, for example, the use of media texts, since there is a change in society‟s behaviour with technological developments in seeking texts that can be read quickly and that bring complete information. Thinking about the interactive patterns emerging in cyber-culture sends our attention to social networks on the internet, which attract an increasing number of users and that is undeniably reflected in the offline reality. This research encourages deepening the studies about the students‟ experience with learning academic English writing skills through social media. To achieve the aim of this study, an exploratory descriptive study was developed, with a qualitative approach. The secondary data was used in the formation of this research. The online databases were the first priority of the researcher for data extraction as due to COVID-19, going to libraries was not possible. This research opens the door for new questions, bringing a priori the perspective for new field of research. The results from the research show that with critical theoretical material from several writers and extensive observation in favour of the use of social media in improving writing skills, it was noticed that there is a change in the way English is being perceived among Arab students, especially in the use of hypertext, the uses of social networks become a differentiating element in improving written English academic skills, if well applied in the didactic actions of writing.