Tips for Using Twitter in an ESL Classroom

Twitter is widely used as a tool for educators to share sources of information and tips with one another, but how can it also be productively used by students? 

 One excellent use for twitter, which applies equally well to other subjects as to ESL, is communication with students and their parents.  Whereas students can easily misplace hard copies of assignments (or conceal them from their parents), twitter offers an easy way to check in on that day’s assignments for both the student and his or her parents.  With many students having smart phones on which a twitter app could be installed, cell phone twitter notifications could serve both as reference, and reminders of assignments.  It also serves as a good method of communication between teachers, parents and students; a teacher could reply quickly and succinctly to questions about assignments in such a way that all students in the class could read the answer.  For these uses, it is possible to set up a private twitter group, so that there is no danger of anyone outside the class reading communication between members of the class and the teacher (instructions for setting up a private twitter group here).

 Another great feature of twitter is that it offers an easy way to link to internet resources for homework assignments.  News in Levels is a fantastic website, offering current news articles simplified so that beginners in English can read them.  In my experience, internet assignments without links are often fraught with disaster, with students misunderstanding instructions and completing the wrong assignment.  Twitter could, for instance, allow a teacher to link to the level 2 version of the April 21 article “Six-year-old girl is saved” with no room for error. 

                David Read, on his blog Mobile ESL gives a third use for twitter.  He encourages discussion between his students after class by asking grammar or vocabulary questions and having students tweet the answers (and shows screenshots of the result in his blog post).  An element of competition could even be added, giving students points for each correct answer and announcing a winner every week.     

                Finally, twitter itself can be used as a means of learning English for students old enough that access to millions of unmoderated tweets is not a concern.  Twitter is used very similarly to blogs by students, but the time put into each contribution is smaller, since twitter limits messages to 140 characters or less.  Teachers assign students to follow a certain number of people on twitter, and to submit a certain number of tweets, in the hopes that this will encourage students to form connections on twitter that allow them to enjoy practicing English outside of class.

As I see it, Twitter does have several advantages over blogs, however:

1.       Twitter’s small character limit provides more opportunities for conversation than blogs.  The limit on message size means that there is no opportunity for anyone to monopolize a conversation with long expressions of opinion.  The limited information included in a tweet encourages people to be brief, and to interact with one another.

2.       Twitter breaks reading and writing assignments into bite-size chunks.  Shorter messages are less intimidating to read and write.  A student might balk at an assignment to write a 1000 word blog post, but a 140 character tweet on a topic of their choice is much less daunting, even if the assignment involves many tweets over a course of time.  Likewise, a student might be willing to spend a few minutes puzzling out a tweet addressed to them, even if they would feel overwhelmed trying to read an entire blog post. 

3.       Twitter allows students to learn the English they are interested in from authentic English writing.  Students can follow their friends, celebrities, experts in the careers they hope to work in themselves, accounts that give news updates, and any other type of account they like.  This allows them to learn the English that they want to use and understand from real English speakers, and to get feedback on the correctness of their own tweets on the same topics.

4.       Twitter exposes students to English idioms, irregularities and rare constructions they may not see in class.

5.       Twitter might encourage students to speak English outside of class. 

Twitter is useful in any classroom for its ability to help organize internet resources, but in ESL classrooms it also helps to fill a major gap in learning: students need real, social, and frequent opportunities to practice English, which they do not get in the classroom.  Although suddenly being exposed to all of twitter is certainly daunting, if a teacher helps students ease into it by limiting the students’ initial exposure to more comprehensible content, English could become a part of students’ lives outside of school and in their free time.

Image by Flickr user brunsell.