In the research the educational potential of Facebook for language acquisition is studied. The methodological experiment and survey were conducted aimed at studying the efficiency of Facebook-assisted teaching in the Facebook group for the development of students' vocabulary, listening and writing skills. Quantitative and qualitative analysis, observation, interpretation, control and measuring were applied in the research. The Facebook group was viewed as an educational environment where a set of specially organized learning materials of different formats was accumulated. The research outlined the useful features and capabilities of the Facebook group for facilitating the learning process and increasing motivation and engagement. The findings proved that the Facebook group learners outperformed the participants of the control groups regarding all three aspects taken: vocabulary (breadth and depth of knowledge), listening skills (listening for general and specific information) and writing skills (content, organization and clarity, vocabulary, spelling and grammatical accuracy). The reasons for the better results of the experimental group participants were identified, including the repeated exposure of the experimental groups students to the target vocabulary, up-to-date and controversial nature of the study content, and visual and interactional nature of the Facebook environment. The survey revealed the positive evaluation of studying in the Facebook environment by the Facebook learners.

he research studied the effectiveness of the integration of Facebook as a flexible ubiquitous learning space into the educational process for speaking skills development of undergraduate students learning English as a second language. For this purpose teaching was organised via a specially created and moderated Facebook group where various media resources, uploaded materials, links to different applications and other social networking opportunities were accumulated. It was designed to achieve the educational programme objectives and address the specifics of digital age learning. A set of specially designed materials posted on the Facebook platform for language input, structured output, and communicative output activities was applied in experimental teaching to develop talk as transition, talk as interaction and mediation, and talk as performance. The results of the quasi-experiment (students’ speaking performance) were assessed in the form of the post-test with the data being analysed and interpreted based on descriptive and inferential statistics (independent samples t-test) by means of SPSS. The results revealed higher achievement scores of the experimental group in comparison to the control group in terms of expanding vocabulary, increasing English grammar literacy, developing interactive skills, discourse management, and pronunciation. The survey administered to find out the learners’ impressions of the successfulness of the FB-assisted activities revealed their overall positive attitude to the new methodology and usefulness for the development of all speaking qualifications checked.

Учебное пособие для системы подготовки кадров государственного управления М о с к в а 2 0 0 4 ISBN 5-98597-007-8 УДК 316.4 ББК 60.524.1