Moving beyond four walls and forming a learning community for speaking practice under the auspices of Facebook

Abstract

There is a paucity of opportunities for Vietnamese EFL students to use and practise English speaking skills both inside and outside the classroom, attributing to students’ lack of interest and motivation in improving their speaking skills. Given that learning can be distributed across a multitude of formal and informal settings, the social and informal features of Facebook serve as potentially ubiquitous support for students to productively practise and use the target language. To date, however, much of the discussion of the promising incorporations of Facebook into EFL teaching and learning repertoire remains largely in writing and intercultural communicative effectiveness, with an evident scarcity of empirical research on students’ speaking practice. This qualitative study was conducted with 10 Vietnamese EFL learners, aiming to examine whether the Facebook-based learning community articulated any educational potentials for EFL speaking practice. The findings revealed that there were three features of the Facebook-based learning community, including flexible access, shared visions and values and collaborative relationships, which were beneficial for the members to maintain learning motivation, be more engaged in peer collaboration and co-construct essential knowledge for speaking practice. The findings suggested that the Facebook-based learning community could serve as a means for promoting more speaking practice among Vietnamese EFL learners.

Acquisition of Communicative Skills by Foreign Students in a Multicultural Learning Environment

“…This assessment comprises 30 statement pairs designed to reveal a respondent's conflict resolution style. This test suggests two scales: "assertiveness" and "cooperativeness", with the help of which five different conflict modes: competing (assertive, not collaborating), avoiding (unassertive, not collaborating), accommodating (unassertive, collaborating), collaborating (assertive, collaborating), and compromising (interim assertiveness, and readiness to collaboration), are registered (Duong & Pham, 2022). The validity of this test has been proven by its authors Thomas and Kilmann (1978).…”

Exploring learning outcomes, communication, anxiety, and motivation in learning communities: a systematic review

“…Through the assistance of learning communities facilitated by social media platforms, students can engage in socio-cultural interactions and actively practice their oral English skills. This is made possible due to the easy accessibility, flexible schedules shared resources, and collaborative attributes of learning communities (Duong and Pham, 2022). In general, learning communities hold the potential to foster desire and motivation within online or distance learning contexts.…”

Sustaining Formal and Informal English Language Learning through Social Networking Sites (SNS): A Systematic Review (2018–2022)

“…These thirty articles revealed that there are five groups of targeted subjects that are of interest to researchers. A significant sum of studies was performed on the tertiary education level learners with 19 articles contributing to the list [30,31,35,36,[38][39][40]43,45,46,[48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55]58]. Five articles were directed towards the response from educators [33,34,42,56,57].…”

“…Based on Table 4 below, it can be deduced that Facebook has received the most attention as a single SNS platform to determine the efficacy of SNS in English language learning. Five articles [36,38,41,49,50] have researched the assimilation of Facebook in formal English learning whereas only one article [42] employed Facebook for informal English learning. About a third of the total articles reviewed [29,35,37,39,40,45,46,48,[51][52][53]57] have not specified any SNS platform in the research, indicating that a lot of studies were done to investigate the influence of SNS as a whole on learning rather than just a single platform.…”