Purpose – This study examines university students’ perceptions and attitudes towards the use of Instagram in English language writing. Like other social networking sites (SNS), the design of Instagram promotes community-centeredness, and supports the dissemination of authentic content that creates opportunities for meaningful interactions among language learners. Methodology – There were 101 participants of this study who participated in a descriptive English essay writing activity on Instagram, answered a set of questionnaire with 20 closed-ended items, and five open-ended questions about using Instagram for English language learning. Focus groups’ discussions with all of the respondents were held to elaborate the open-ended items. The closed-items were analysed quantitatively using mean scores, while the open-ended items were analysed both quantitatively (mean scores) and qualitatively (content analysis). Findings – The results demonstrated students’ high positive perceptions and views towards using Instagram in improving their writing skills, but moderate attitudes. Significance – Based on the more favourable responses, it is about time that language teachers implement the preeminent social media platform such as Instagram to create conducive learning environment that could boost students’ motivation in English language learning.

Academic online portals of Learning Management System (LMS) and social media have become a necessity in many higher education institutions to tie classroom meetings with learning resources. This study examines Malaysian university students' preferences of social media and LMS for academic purposes. A set of questionnaires was distributed to 269 students at four Malaysian universities. The results show that the students preferred both social media and e-learning for academic purposes, although their interest in social media was slightly higher than that of e-learning. The students had a higher regard for the academic content shared with them, than the design of a social media or e-learning platform. This suggests that both social media and e-learning are highly suitable to be used in academic environment to cater to students' need for formal-informal learning.

The study examines university students’ perceptions of their motivation, attitude, and self-efficacy in online English proficiency classes. Existing research indicate that these individual differences directly affect learning especially during the period of online instructions; as students may suffer from the feeling of isolation and loneliness, being far away from an immediate learning community. A set of questionnaire score was created from the adaptation of five existing surveys to measure the individual differences. It was distributed to 270 participants via convenient sampling at a university in Malaysia. The results of this study demonstrate the students’ perception of a strong self-efficacy of their digital and technical ability in managing, completing, and submitting English language tasks via online medium. Relatedly, students perceive a high positive attitude and decent motivation for online English learning. Furthermore, the students demonstrate a preference for a synchronous session, which is linked to forming a community of learners as an academic support system. The findings are discussed in relation to human factors and pedagogy. It considers students’ needs for engaging sessions, and teachers’ limitations in creating content while emphasising creative and fun language activities.

This study uses WhatsApp to facilitate online discussions in developing content idea for ESL writing. A quasi-experimental study was conducted with 33 pre-university students participating in online discussions on WhatsApp for five weeks to support face-to-face instructions. Pre-test, post-test, and five weekly writing tests were administered, examined, and analysed to identify the participants' writing performance. The findings show significant improvement in the experimental group's essay writing scores after using WhatsApp for online discussions. The participants were able to use the content generated from the MWEG in supporting the arguments in their essays. Besides content idea development, the experimental group saw the WhatsApp online discussions as boosting confidence, raising motivation, and encouraging interactions among students. The themes that emerged from the WhatsApp group interaction were lively discussions, sharing of opinions, and turn-taking. While the control group also improved in their test scores, it was not as significant as the experimental group.