The Potential of TikTok’s Key Features as a Pedagogical Strategy for ESL Classrooms

Abstract

The predominance of the use of the English language on social media entails its potential usefulness in regard to ESL learning. Amongst all social media platforms, none can boast the ubiquity of TikTok. This application has been, and continues to be, one of the largest and most influential social media platforms, as well as a massive success across a range of fields with the most active users in the world. In the field of education, it has the potential to enhance educational pedagogies. Although TikTok has various features aligned to language learning, TikTok’s application within the education field is still largely unexplored. This scoping review aims to identify the key features of TikTok that can be used to enhance pedagogical strategies in sustaining the teaching of language skills in ESL classrooms. Although studies have been conducted on this subject, they have often lacked clarity and also lacked the possibility of synthesis in regard to the contribution of this platform to language education. Thus, this scoping review is conducted in order to identify the useful TikTok elements that strengthened pedagogical strategies in ESL classrooms. A total of 60 publications with publication dates spanning from 2018 to 2021 were chosen from searches on the EBSCOhost, Google Scholar, and ERIC databases in order to illustrate the current state. The outcome of using the identified features of TikTok and key pedagogical TikTok strategies for the purposes of ESL learning were the two themes used to synthesize the data. Findings indicated that video-related features and the duet challenge feature in TikTok have potential in promoting engaging and meaningful learning, in the context of a virtual environment. This potential has enabled the use of major pedagogical strategies, such as digital assignment; active learning; collaborative and team-based learning; experiential learning; and incidental and constructive learning. Although using TikTok is beneficial for the purposes of language learning, the findings of this study also revealed several limitations associated with the platform, such as users’ behavior, poor infrastructure, and an absence of online discussion forums. This review contains suggestions for the purposes of assisting teachers in terms of maximizing their use of TikTok, via overcoming the challenges that were highlighted in previous studies.

The Pedagogical use of Social Networks to improve Writing Skills with EFL Students from Nabón Third Grade High School

“…Videos help language learners improve their four basic communication skills (Duan, 2023). To (Tan et al, 2022) TIKTOK has been defined as a pedagogical potential tool because of its influence on teaching-learning. TIKTOK is an alternative method of learning writing which provides students with opportunities to write and expose themselves to the outside world.…”

Enhancing students' pedagogical potential with practice-oriented courses in teacher education universities

“…At the same time, with all the initial semantic similarities, the concepts of "personal potential of a teacher" and "pedagogical potential" cannot be considered identical (Geng, Chai, Jong, & Luk, 2021;Rysbek et al, 2022;Vykhrushch, Romanyshyna, Pehota, Shorobura, & Kravets, 2020;Yorgancıoğlu, Tunalı, & Çetinel, 2022). If the personal potential of a teacher remains a psychological construct, then the concept of "pedagogical potential" is considered mainly from scientific and pedagogical positions (Tan, Rajendran, Muslim, Alias, & Yusof, 2022). In particular, the pedagogical potential as a category can be used to characterize processes and phenomena of various kinds: the pedagogical potential of culture (Winman, 2019), the pedagogical potential of the media (Kazak et al, 2017), the pedagogical potential of children's leisure (Lager, 2019), and so on.…”

Usos de TikTok en educación. Revisión sistemática de la aplicabilidad didáctica de TikTok

“…Los trabajos analizados muestran la diversidad de contextos de aplicación posibles: en enseñanza presencial o en línea (Lampe, 2023), en universidad (Escamilla-Fajardo, Alguacil y López-Carril, 2021; Syarifuddin y Sinta, 2022) u otras etapas educativas (Sari et al, 2022); en historia (Yélamos-Guerra, García-Gámez y Moreno-Ortiz, 2022); estadística empresarial (Ding, Xu y Lewis, 2022); química (Hayes et al, 2020); danza (Heyang y Martin, 2022); gimnasia rítmica o fitness (Sari et al, 2022); literatura (Rajan e Ismail, 2022), o enseñanza de idiomas (Dasoo, 2023;Espejel et al, 2022;Gao et al, 2023;Hu y Du, 2022;Tan et al, 2022). Asimismo, evidencian sus diferentes aplicaciones didácticas, a las que aludiremos a continuación.…”

“…TikTok es considerada una plataforma especialmente útil para el aprendizaje de idiomas y, concretamente, el desarrollo de la dimensión comunicativa digital, puesto que el medio fomenta de manera natural la práctica de diversas destrezas orales (Espejel et al, 2022). Según Tan et al (2022), hay una amplia gama de estrategias que pueden aplicar los profesores, dentro y fuera del aula, con el fin de mejorar las habilidades orales del alumnado y que TikTok haría posibles. Por ejemplo, por una parte, TikTok permitiría la imitación y el modelado, si se proporcionasen en tiempo real ejemplos de diálogos basados en diferentes situaciones.…”