Article Review

A REVIEW ON THE ARTICLE INTERGRATING SOCIAL NETWORKING INTO ESL CLASSROOM

            As technology expands, students nowadays can improve English writing by intergrating social networking tools into it. There are advantages and disadvantages using these social networking services to teach. It brings benefits to students because students with lower language skills will feel less stress communicating with others, they will do it easily whenever they have free time and it can set off students' creative thinking skills. For the students, they will find this exciting and fun chatting with their peers, it will also motivate them to improve their English when they see their friends are posting English sentences on social network. However, we might face some difficulties such as accessing the internet when the school lack of equipments to connect to the internet, the teachers' time to interact with the students is insufficient. Also, it will be pricey to equip students with computers. It will not improve much of the students' English skills when they are using short forms on social network and students will get easily distracted with the internet. More over, the students are not educated with the rights and responsibilities to post something on social network. There are pros and cons using the social networking to teach students, but if we do not misuse the benefits of technology, social networking would be the most effective tool in English teaching.

        We have Facebook, Twitter, Friendster, Google+, hi5, Reddit, and the list continues. My experience? I don't have any experience teaching someone using social networking or learning English using it but I think it's better to teach the students the old school way that is, eye to eye, mouth to ear. Using social networking to teach students English is something new to me. Sure it will be exciting but the teachers will face lots of problem because students will get easily distracted with internet, they will do something that is not important rather than improving their writing skills. This is only one example of the problem that the English teachers will face, of course there are lots of it coming. If I'm going to teach students to improve their writing skills, I will use technology, no doubt about that, because I will figure out something creative to teach my students, but social networking is not going to be my first option.