100 / 2018-05-06 10:49:12

Exploring the Educational Potentials of Facebook® Fanpages® in ESP Courses: A Case Study

CMC; ESL/EFL Education; Facebook; Fanpages; SNS

全体主题 > ESP 教材设计及开发

Nowadays, Social Networking Services (SNS) have quickly become an indispensable part of many people’s lives; this is especially true for college students. Among them, Facebook®, open to the general public since 2006, expands its population to over 2.2 billion monthly active users by Q1, 2018, making it one of the most dominant SNS nowadays. Meanwhile, the authors’ previous successful attempts to apply SNS’s Facebook® and WeChat® into other ESL courses have brought about students’ encouraging responses, including enhanced learning motivation, closer teacher-student relationship and better achievement of targeted English language skills. Therefore, following the track, this project aims to further explore the educational possibilities of Facebook® Fanpage®s in a college ESP course, which is “English for Workplaces”. The subject students of this research are undergraduate students in Chung Hua University, located at Hsinchu City in the northern Taiwan, whose levels of English proficiency are low to intermediate. The course is designed to build up their familiarity with English uses needed in workplaces and to enhance their confidence to use it. Two components make up the course: the lecture part and the online sessions, with the latter conducted on a Facebook® Fanpage®.
This paper initially introduces the design and application procedures of applying a Facebook® Fanpage® into teaching an ESP course and then categorizes some advantages and disadvantages of this innovative teaching method. The results are hoped to provide ESL/EFL teachers an different way to teach ESP courses to their EFL students.