Guided use of social media in classrooms can boost language development of English-learners, finds new research from the University of Minnesota.
In a voluntary five-day summer school session on critical media literacy, researchers gave refugee students opportunities to write about themselves using Facebook—a familiar medium for many of the students—and lessons in English and Somali, their native language. While the researchers did not assess literacy growth, they found writing and sharing in an online space sparked more extensive use of written English and rich, interactive group learning experiences.
