1 THE DEVELOPMENT OF ENGLISH VOCABULARY AMONG SAUDI TWITTER USERS

Abstract

Twitter is a prominent micro-blogging platform among Saudi people, which indicates that Saudi users are now constantly engaged with thousands of native English speakers as well as other English as foreign language students and teachers. This research sheds light on the use of Twitter by Saudi users to determine their improvement of English vocabulary. The study examined how participants’ social interactions on Twitter can support second language vocabulary learning as well as the factors that influenced their decision to use Twitter to enhance their second language learning. The purpose of this research is to examine how Saudi users have adapted to Twitter and how they use it as an English language learning tool. As a theoretical framework, the researcher employed Vygotsky’s socio-cultural theory and zone of proximal development model, according to which when a learner is in the zone of proximal development for a specific assignment, offering the necessary support provides enough of a “boost” for the learner to complete the task independently via social interaction. To this end, 63 Saudi Twitter users with various levels of education were selected. Their ages ranged from 18–40 years old, and they were all likely to be of Arab descent. Based on a mixed-method approach, the data were collected through survey questionnaires. This mixed-methods study, which included survey questionnaires, examined the use of Twitter for educational reasons, with a focus on improving English vocabulary. An open and close-ended survey questionnaire was used to collect quantitative data from the selected sample. Survey questionnaire consisted of three parts. The first part addressed the demographic information, such as age, academic ranking, years of exposure to the English language, and study level of the participants. The second subsection consisted of open-ended questions to acquire in-depth, detailed data about the users’ perceptions of their English learning experiences using Twitter. The third subsection consisted of five Likert scale questions to investigate if they learned new vocabulary by Twitter, if they were confident in using English on Twitter, and if Twitter helped them to increase their knowledge of English vocabulary. The perceived attributes of Twitter were evaluated using a five-point Likert-type scale ranging from strongly agree to strongly disagree. The results revealed that Twitter had a positive impact, improving English vocabulary by 82.5% in. Twitter motivated users to communicate confidently with native speakers, with 63% scored in total. These findings can be expanded by more experimental research to assess how Twitter can be successfully used as a teaching tool in English language learning classrooms in Saudi Arabia and other countries. The findings suggest that Twitter and other social networking sites can be used as English language learning tools. Several implications and suggestions for teachers, policy makers, and scholars are discussed.