This was part of a workshop called Web 2.0 and Virtual Reality, offered by myself and by Alice Grüber

1. CMC SIG WORKSHOP
Twitter as a tool to learn languages
EUROCALL 2019
Salvador Montaner-Villalba
CMC SIG Chair
UNED, PhD Researcher

2. THROUGH
VOCABULARY
Authenticity of the input the students are likely to receive on
Twitter
Teachers need to be cautious while selecting twitted “chunks” since all users
may not be competent speakers of English
One possible task:
Students tweet lexis, their definitions, morphology, and grammatical functions,
and they are twitted
Teacher and classmates give hints on incorrect entries. Teacher might find
mistakes and correct them immediately
@RolloffTongue
@WordsWithLarry
@OED

3. THROUGH GRAMMAR
1. Learn & Revise Grammar
GRAMMARLY Grammar Checker Tool @Grammarly
English Club @EnglishClub
Grammar Monkeys quizzes, exercises, @GrammarMonkeys
The Yuniversities images and tips @The_YUNiversity
English247 @English247
More resources: hashtag #grammar
2. Correct Grammar. link
Students might be invited to correct grammar in celebrity tweets

4. READING (I)
TWITTER + LITERATURE = TWITTERATURE
Students might read books that have been twitted
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet at https://twitter.com/romeo
GENRES:
1) Aphorisms.
“The most effective way to learn is by devoting oneself to a single subject for
months at a time. Its opposite is school” @ahaspel
2) Poetry
@poetryenglish1
@GreiderDD (Swedish poet)
#haiku

5. READING (II)
TWITTER + LITERATURE = TWITTERATURE
3) Fiction
•140-character stories
@veryshortstories, Jeffrey Archer, Ian Rankin
•Fan fiction. Characters in Films, TV series, and books
•Literary classics and legends
1) characters' tweeting and interacting 2) retelling in tweet format
Aciman & Rensin (2009) Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books Retold
Through Twitter, Penguin
•The twitter novel. Some examples
•Collaborative works. Neil Gaimann’s experiment conducted with BBC America Audio Books

6. WRITING
Reading and writing can be integrated
Students are asked to read twitted written texts
Then, they can further be asked to
write similar sort of text and to post it
STORY WRITING:
Teacher posts the starting of the story and gets the students to complete it
collaboratively. The first student develops it by adding 140 characters, and this
will continue until the story is completed.
CREATIVE THINKING & WRITING THROUGH TWITTER
LET’S PRACTICE

7. SPEAKING
LIVE-TWEET
Students can be asked to post oral tweets telling their teacher and classmates
what they are doing, what they have seen and what are the most
interesting moments
This is especially helpful to the students who need assistance, peer support or
teachers‟ support can help them improve their language production.
RECORDING THROUGH CAMERA

8. LISTENING
INTEGRATED WITH SPEAKING AND WRITING
@TwitterVideo
twitted video or audio texts
Students can be assigned to listen to a particular twitted listening text and to
write a summary of the text to post. This will be followed by teachers’ and
other students’ feedback.
Some examples of accounts:
@VickiVideos
@VideoTSEnglish
@bbcmagvideo
@TwitterLive

9. ASSESSING
CREATING SURVEYS

10. “There’s an entire universe in every single tweet…”
—Jack Dorsey
THANK YOU VERY MUCH
smontaner@invi.uned.es
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Salvador_Montaner-Villalba
https://www.linkedin.com/in/salvadormontanerdocente/