Saudi Students’ Perspective on Social Media Usage to Promote EFL Learning

This paper reports on a study into Saudi students’ perspectives on social media usage to promote EFL learning. Sixty Saudi learners of English as a foreign language enrolled at Jazan University were participants in the study. To gauge the participants’ perspective; a questionnaire was designed, adapted from Aifan (2015) and previous studies on social media and perceived attitude. We modified the questionnaire to our requisites to accomplish the real response on the use of social media to encourage collaboration and communication. The participants were asked to respond about their perceptions to use English on Social media, affective variables, and hypothetical usefulness of social media applications of what they learned in the class and reflecting on their learning experience in English. Results showed that students had a positive attitude toward social media usage, despite a few barriers, feeling more confident, less anxious, more competent, and more willing to communicate in English on social media. We suggest that the careful construction of tasks, activities and projects based on the use of social media integrate with the curriculum, workshops and faculty development programs on social media usage can have a positive effect on the language learning process.