Facebook as a means to promote social interaction

Abstract

Since the beginnings of social network sites, Facebook has attracted millions of users who have made of it, a part of their daily lives. In terms of communication and social interaction,Facebook has become a tool that allows continued transmission of information, and this aspect has played a role in educational contexts. This monograph raised from the problem that studentsfrom a language institute tended to avoid oral communication while learning, especially when addressing collaborative work. This situation has carried a negative affection during their foreignlanguage learning. Based on this difficulty, this project aimed to identify the periodicity of interaction from the students, using the virtual platform Facebook. Additionally, this study seeks to detect how significant the students perceive learning a foreign language through a social network website. This study was carried out in a language institute, where the learners developed activities regarding a pedagogical intervention taking six weeks. We considered, screenshots from the Facebook group, field notes, Students’ artifacts and surveys as data sources to support this project. As result of the pedagogical intervention we concluded that social network sites can be part of the learning process contributing – as it did in this project – not only to the enrichment of social aspects but also to the improvement of the pragmatic competence in a second language.