The role of social media in a Second Language Acquisition environment: TikTok as a tool for learning English

Abstract

[eng] The use of social media has grown exponentially in recent years, especially after the pandemic. Therefore, TikTok became a useful tool for people to evade themselves and be connected with one another. Nowadays, at the height of the application boom, this paper tries to ascertain if TikTok is seen by adolescents as a tool for learning English as a second language, taking into special account the improvement of the Listening and the Speaking skills. It will explore the opinions of students in secondary education regarding the support this app can provide for learning a language, its advantages, disadvantages and if it can be considered as an alternative of other ICT tools. A survey will be conducted to register the answers, examining the students’ responses. Results confirm that students see TikTok as a motivating apparatus to cope with the EFL learning process, as well as facing in-class activities and exams. This paper may also be a first step to future studies that contemplate using TikTok as a tool to create didactic proposals.