Twitter in Foreign Language Classes: Initiating Learners into Contemporary Language Variation

This chapter looks at the potential of the mircroblogging tool Twitter as a multifaceted resource for foreign language learners and educators. It highlights how this microblogging and social networking service provides authentic settings that are both dynamic and communicative, and which facilitate the cultural enrichment of first-year French learners, by enhancing their socio-pragmatic awareness and developing their multiliteracy skills in a second language. We argue for the importance of making students aware of this linguistic culture from an early stage of their language studies. This invisible second language culture is rarely discussed in traditional classrooms and only sporadically presented in foreign language textbooks; however, it can easily be experienced in digital environments like Twitter, making it an ideal context for such exposure. Our results suggest that the incorporation of linguistic cultural elements is indispensable to the development of intercultural communicative competence, a skill that paves the way for successful communication across national boundaries and in different electronic discourses. Geraldine Blattner Florida Atlantic University, USA Amanda Dalola The University of South Carolina, USA Lara Lomicka The University of South Carolina, USA