The Impact of Feedback in Facebook on Students’ Language Proficiency

• Main Author: Visara Ekahitanond
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: UIKTEN 2018-08-01
• Series: TEM Journal
• Subjects: Facebook; language proficiency; feedback
• Online Access: http://www.temjournal.com/content/73/TemJournalAugust2018_686_692.pdf

Facebook is a wealth of knowledge, which allows group discussion, asking questions, exposing to different perspectives, observing new information, sharing experiences, discovering newness of life, and socio-pragmatic development. It is an open platform for knowledge exchange from scholars with minimum cost but maximum effectiveness. The idea of using Facebook as a learning tool was implemented in an English for Specific Purposes course at a private university. This study was conducted to find out the effects of online feedback in Facebook on students’ language proficiency and investigate their attitudes toward learning through Facebook. Forty participants were selected to take part in the experiment during the first semester of 2017 academic year. Two assignments were a requirement of the course comprising news writing and news reading. In each assignment, scores were given to students’ practice and real performance. The study employed feedback offered by teacher and peers in Facebook as a tool to develop students’ proficiency. The findings reveal that there were statistically significant improvements in the revised writing draft and news reading which were linked to peers and teacher feedback. An enormous decrease in making mistakes indicated that students used the comments to improve their performances. In addition, the replies from an open-ended questionnaire indicated positive attitudes toward the use of Facebook as a learning tool. However, several disadvantages along with suggestions are useful for future course development.