The Use of Twitter and Facebook in Teaching Mechanics of Writing to Arabic-Speaking EFL Learners

Abstract

This study aims to compare the effect of Twitter and Facebook in teaching mechanics of writing by 20 Arabic-speaking EFL learners in an attempt to determine which tool is more effective. We adopt the experimental design of a pre- and post-test to measure the participants’ knowledge of English mechanics of writing before and after the treatment, which involved taking part in describing a picture on these two social media networks for two weeks. We divided the 20 participants into two groups: one used Twitter and the other used Facebook to complete the description task. We administered a 100-word essay task as the pre- and post-test to determine whether the use of Twitter helped the participants improve their knowledge of the mechanics of writing more than the use of Facebook or vice versa. The results reveal that the difference between the numbers of errors produced by both groups were not statistically significant even though, the group that used Facebook produced a lower number of errors on the post-test. The subsequent semi-structured focus group discussions provided more insight into the answers of both groups on the post-test. The study concludes with recommendations for further research.