Name : Puspita Zulviandari

Class : AB English 3A

In Twitter, the people basically answer a question, “What is happening?” In this way, people all
over the world can communicate with each other. There are some #hashtags that people can
easily find the tweets or comments about the topic from all over the world and they can keep up
with the latest news easily. Twitter has a social network of subscribers, or followers. Users can
create a profile ID, which is displayed as @username, and “each user submits periodic status
updates, known as tweets, which consist of short messages of maximum size 140 characters….
and these tweets may be forwarded to other followers in an action known as retweeting” (Asur &
Huberman, 2010, p.2) Twitter is called a microblogging site. It enables the users to post a short
text as a message distributed among the big community members. The service has gained
worldwide popularity; there are about 645 million registered users in 2012, who posted 340
million tweets per day (Worldstats.com, 2013).
I saw Twitter as an advantage to language learning. Twitter is a means of communication that
virtually all learners are familiar with and it usually provides a context robust enough to make up
for gaps in students' linguistic or cultural knowledge, even though tweets are short—which is
another advantage. Twitter is a one-of-a-kind tool that language learners everywhere can use to
achieve fluency. Twitter is short and simple enough that language learners are able to study and
mine tweets for language gems. Its bite-sized nature makes it very digestible. It lives right in that
vocabulary sweet spot where you have just enough context to make out what words might mean
in a foreign language.
Ullrich et al. (2008) carried out a study about the use of Twitter for language learning with very
positive results: 94% of their students, based in China, believed that their English had improved
with the help of Twitter. The students communicated with each other in English through Twitter
and half of them also communicated with native speakers. Similar results were found by Kim,
Park, and Baek (2011): from their study of 45 Korean school children learning English as a
Foreign Language (EFL), they concluded that the use of Twitter had stimulated their mixed-
ability participants to produce output in the target language and engage in social interaction with
fellow students as well as native speakers.