I don’t know about you, but I am encountering more and more pupils who are learning English with social media. Instead of using books or audio courses, they are reading and replying to Tweets and following English-speaking influencers on YouTube.
Whilst social media can have a bad rep, and rightly so, it is also an incredible language learning opportunity. It seems that pupils of all ages now have access to social media of some sort and they now have the possibility to make their scrolling educational.
The positive side of social media
A huge factor needed to successfully learn a foreign language is motivation. This can be hard for pupils to find in a traditional school setting. I only have to think back to my own experiences of learning a foreign language to understand… It’s not easy to find a real reason to learn a language when the only exposure you have to it is in a classroom with a non-native speaker.
That is where social media comes in with its huge capacity to incite the desire to learn a new language. Pupils want to learn English when they see that all of the biggest TikTok trends are in English. Or when their favourite singer is American and only does interviews in English. Or when they make online friends through Twitter and they need to communicate in English.
I have seen pupils’ English levels soar simply because they encounter it daily on social media. I have noticed that the pupils who consume lots of English content every day speak English in an extremely natural way.
The negative side of social media
However, it would be naive to say that social media only has a positive effect on language learning.
Even though the advantages are big, there are still some problems that come along with it. For me, the biggest one is that pupils pick up bad language habits from social media.
Textspeak, using a lowercase ‘I’, swear words, euphemisms, and informal language such as “gonna” become habits that are hard to break. As a result, written productions are usually not written with an appropriate register of language and this ends up penalising pupils.
Since English is not their native language, they often don’t understand the nuances in register nor the strength of certain words. This is all a normal part of being a beginner learner of a language but it can be problematic when pupils aren’t properly taught these things.
Learning English with social media is a really great way to encourage and motivate pupils. But it can’t fully replace structured teaching, in my opinion. This doesn’t have to be done in a school setting, but via an online course or by following a textbook alongside.
I think that it’s important to avoid falling into bad habits when starting to learn a language. It will make the rest of your journey easier!
A good resource to recommend to pupils is the YouTube channel “Easy English“. They interview native speakers in the street and ask them a range of different questions. It’s great for vocabulary and hearing different accents!
If you are looking for other English resources, then check out my TPT store via these posts: here and here.
Let me know what you think in the comments about this topic.