Innovation in Language Learning

The incorporation of social media into the contemporary classroom has revolutionised teaching and learning. One such social networking platform, Twitter, provides users with the ability to share 140-character messages, known as tweets, with other users of the service. While this microblogging platform offers numerous affordances for learning, little research exists which examines its effectiveness as a learning tool in second language pedagogy.

This paper examines the perceptions of sixty-four pre-service elementary teachers regarding the use of Twitter as a pedagogical tool in a second language pedagogy course. The course focused on the teaching of the Irish language as a second language. Irish, or Gaeilge, is an autochthonous language spoken in the Republic of Ireland and is a compulsory subject in government-funded English-medium primary schools.

The social networking web application was integrated into the twelve week course pedagogy in educationally relevant and productive ways and students were invited to post Twitter feeds outside of class in the Irish language to complement and extend in-class work. The theoretically driven pedagogical basis for the intervention was to enhance content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge (Shulman, 1987) of the Irish language. Data were collected from a variety of sources e.g. online survey, module questionnaires, focus groups and students’ tweets.

This research provides evidence to indicate the effectiveness of Twitter as a pedagogical tool in second language pedagogy from a student-informed perspective. Findings suggest that the collaborative nature of online interaction was central to developing both students’ linguistic and pedagogical resources in Irish. Twitter was used in intense and multifaceted ways which promoted engagement, a positive learning experience, self-directed practices, a support network and the sharing of resources. Implications for educators, researchers and educational institutions will also be considered in relation to the potential uses of Twitter as a pedagogy of possibility in second language pedagogy.