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In a recent lesson with Pierre we read some tweets together by the CNN correspondent Nicole Lapin. It was Pierre’s suggestion that we look at her twitter page because he was having some difficulty understanding the tweets.

This is the first time that I had used Twitter in class, although I had encouraged another student to sign up for twitter and to follow the Swedish tourism office, because he is shortly going on holiday to Sweden.

Although this wasn’t a planned activity with twitter, it did lead to some interesting observations about the potential of twitter for the language classroom.

Twitter English – The Differences
The English used in microblogging services such as Twitter seems different from that used in ordinary blogging or elsewhere on the web.

• Twitter English (TwEnglish / Twitterese) is different from normal English and different even from text messaging. As such, reading TwEnglish is a skill in itself.
  • Spelling: The spelling may be different – although it doesn’t seem to be vastly different from emails or note taking (with a pen). An example is “ya” in one of Nicole Lapin’s tweets
  • SMS style contractions: Twitter does not seem to lead to the abbreviations used in texting (see Txting: The Gr8 Db8 by David Crystal)
  • @ & #: use of @ for intended recipients and # for tags
  • Grammar: There are changes in grammar that can be found in tweets (probably because of the need to be concise). David Crystal’s blog mentions how the progressive passive is used in Twitter.
• Tweets are anyhow different from longer writing because of the lack of context and above all the brevity of the communication.
  • Conversations: Twitter is clearly all about the conversation and so the lesson naturally led to following the original tweets that Nicole Lapin was responding to.
  • Context: there is usually very little context (within the tweet itself) from which to work out the meaning of tweets. However, there are ways to gain a context, such as following the links within the tweets and tracing back through the conversations.

Some Observations

• Culturally specific terms: There were several times when culturally specific terms came up – such as simply the use of “Staples Center”, which follows a North American pattern of sponsorship for public arenas (eg Pepsi, Verizon, Wachovia, United, American Airlines)
• Relevance and timeliness: CNN tweets are certainly very timely and also relevant to those who naturally follow the news.
• Twitter conversations: Although this activity was a passive use of Twitter (ie not writing tweets), the reading did offer constant opportunity for conversation and for the student to relate his life and views to the tweets. It was a kind of lurking and therefore this particular activity did not lead to an engagement in the conversation with other Twitter users. However, Twitter can be used in a more proactive way by encouraging students to write tweets and to maintain conversations with others. I think what this shows is that a web 2.0 tool such as twitter can be both used as a stimulus for classroom based discussion and also to expand the classroom to include conversations with non-members of the class.
• Narrow Reading: In some sense, reading tweets is a form of narrow reading, because the style used is so concise as to be similar to other tweets. However, in a more general sense, this is not at all narrow reading. The student is in fact reading multiple conversations, which probably have very little relationship to one another. So the contexts vary greatly and therefore the vocabulary.
• New Reading Skills: Scott Thornbury points out that students don’t need to be taught to develop reading skills in their L2 lessons: if they already know how to read, then the translation of that skill (such as skimming) to a target language is something they can do naturally on their own. This makes sense for most situations, but I wonder whether students and teachers may now be facing new reading skills (such as reading twitter); it could well be that some students are meeting Twitterature for the first time when reading it in L2 and perhaps the lesson should be consciously guiding the student with this new skill.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 9th, 2009 at 9:38 pm and is filed under ACTIVITIES, AUTHOR: HOWARD VICKERS, TECHNOLOGIES. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.