The Future of Education

In Jordan, an Arab country, French is taught as a foreign language. As some work has been done to introduce eLearning and blended learning in classes of foreign languages at the Jordanian universities, the use of social networking applications for language learning is still not very common. Recently, social media is widely used by the young generation in everyday life. Many studies indicated the effectiveness of social media platforms in learning languages. For Lin et al. (Lin, C.H., Warschauer, M., & Blake, R. 2016), social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, What’s App and YouTube is becoming a major tool for students, as it helps them generate information as well as sharing it with wide network at the local and international levels. Social media, also increased social interaction and information sharing amongst students and teachers.
This paper aims to study the extent to which social media is widespread among students of French language at the University of Jordan in their language learning. It also aims to explore how the use of multiple social media could complement other language teaching/learning tools.
To do so a questionnaire was administered to four year students at the Department of French at the Faculty of Foreign Languages, in the University of Jordan. The number of students who participated in the study is 60. In this questionnaire, students were asked to rate the frequency of their use of different social media platforms, and their attitudes towards its usefullness to further their language skills. The results showed that what’s App groups is the most used tool, followed by youtube. The results also indicated that their attitudes towards the use of social media in enhancing the learning of French, were on the whole positive.

Keywords: Social Media, French language, learning foreign languages.

References:
[1] Lin, C.H., Warschauer, M., & Blake, R. (2016). Language learning through social networks. Language Learning and  Technology,  20(1),  124-147.  Retrieved  10  march   2019  from
https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/bitstream/10125/44449/1/20_01_linwarschauerblake.pdf
[2] Derakshan,  A., &  Hasanbbassi, S.  (2015). Social networks for language learning.  Theories and Practices in Language Studies, 5(5), 1090-195. DOI:
http://dx.doi.org/10.17507/tpls.0505.25…