https://doi.org/10.15446/profile.v26n1.105685
Analysing the Functionality of Twitter for Science Dissemination in
EFL Teaching and Learning
Análisis de la utilidad de Twitter para la divulgación científica en la enseñanza y
aprendizaje del inglés como lengua extranjera
Ana E. Sancho-Ortiz1
Universidad de Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain
The University Research Institute on Employment, Digital Society and Sustainability (IEDIS), Spain
Communication through social media is a phenomenon whose relevance has involved the consideration
of online discourse in the language teaching context. This article explores the functionality of Twitter
(now called “X”) for science dissemination within the teaching and learning of English as a foreign
language. To do this, 100 tweets from the accounts @WWF and @Greenpeace were gathered and analysed
from the perspective of digital discourse analysis and communicative language teaching. I argue that
using these tweets encourages the development of key competencies, provides room for the practice of
integrated skills, and enhances the application of 21st-century skills. Conclusively, science dissemination
tweets may be considered adequate for teaching and learning English.
Keywords: English as a foreign language, language teaching, multimodality, online discourse, Twitter
La comunicación en redes sociales es un fenómeno cuya relevancia ha supuesto la irrupción del discurso
en línea en la enseñanza de idiomas. Este artículo explora la funcionalidad de Twitter (ahora conocida
como “X”) como medio de divulgación científica en el contexto de la enseñanza y aprendizaje del inglés
como lengua extranjera. Para ello, se seleccionaron y analizaron 100 tuits de las cuentas @WWF y @
Greenpeace desde la perspectiva del análisis del discurso digital y del método comunicativo. Así, se
argumenta que este tipo de textos puede favorecer el desarrollo de competencias clave del siglo XXI y
el trabajo de destrezas lingüísticas. Se concluye que los tuits de divulgación científica pueden constituir
una herramienta adecuada para la enseñanza y aprendizaje del inglés.
Palabras clave: enseñanza de idiomas, discurso en línea, inglés como lengua extranjera, multimodalidad,
Twitter
1
Ana E. Sancho-Ortiz https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5966-8038 · Email: a.sancho@unizar.es
This article is based on the master’s thesis completed by Sancho-Ortiz (2022).
This research is a contribution to the Intergedi research project (http://intergedi.unizar.es/). Grant PID2021-122303NB-100, funded by
MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by “ERDF A way of making Europe”, as well as by Gobierno de Aragón (H16_23), Spain.
How to cite this article (APA, 7th ed.): Sancho-Ortiz, A. E. (2024). Analysing the functionality of Twitter for science dissemination in EFL
teaching and learning. Profile: Issues in Teachers’ Professional Development, 26(1), 133–147. https://doi.org/10.15446/profile.v26n1.105685
This article was received on November 7, 2022 and accepted on September 12, 2023.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons license Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives
4.0 International License. Consultation is possible at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
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Introduction
The English as a foreign language (EFL) teaching
and learning scenario has been subject to many changes
in the last decades as regards the type of materials,
methods, or competencies used and promoted in the
classroom. One of the most significant variations in this
context has been the establishment of communicative
competence as the aim of learning English (Richards,
2006). There have been several attempts to incorporate
diverse means and methods that could facilitate the
acquisition process (Lightbown, 2003), within which the
introduction of digital technologies and the promotion
of students’ information and communication technology
(ICT) competence constitute a perfect example of such
an innovative tendency (Dudeney & Hockly, 2007). This
tendency to foster technological practices in the EFL
context has resulted in an increasing need for further
in-depth analyses concerning the educational use of
technology, for example, the possible applications of
social media as teaching and learning tools. To contribute
to this study gap, this paper delves into the potential of
Twitter—a microblogging digital platform—as an EFL
teaching and learning tool, focusing on the functionality
of science dissemination tweets and the applicability of its
main affordances (e.g., multimodality and hyperlinking)
for this purpose. To carry out this analysis, the present
study is framed within the normative context of Spanish
secondary education, specifically of the autonomous
community of Aragón.1
What Characterises EFL
Teaching and Learning Today?
The character of English as an indispensable vehicle
for global communication has meant the consolidation of
this language as a basic learning area in most educational
1 The legal framework considered in this study is (a) the Spanish
national educational law, i.e., the LOMLOE (Ley Orgánica 3, 2020)—
which stands for the organic law which modifies previous law, LOE—
and (b) its Aragonese adaptation in the autonomic legislation (Orden
ECD/1172, 2022) and Curriculum for English as Foreign Language (Anexo
II, Orden ECD/1172, 2022).
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curricula worldwide. Such educational perspective is
rooted in the belief that second/foreign language (L2)
learners need to develop what Hymes (1972) termed
“communicative competence,” that is, the ability to use
the L2 as it is done in real-life communication. This
interest in communication skills led, in the 1970s, to
the development of communicative language teaching
(CLT), an approach to language teaching aimed at
fostering learners’ communicative competence, which
ousted traditional grammatical approaches (Spada,
2007).
Adopting a communicative approach resulted from
the rising importance of communication in second
language acquisition (SLA) studies (Dörnyei, 2009;
Lightbown, 2003). This explains the alignment of CLT
with the eleven principles of instructed SLA proposed
by Ellis and Shintani (2014).2 Out of these principles,
scholars have widely considered Principle 6 (the need
for input exposure), analysing whether L2 input should
come from interaction (Gass, 2013) or authentic materials
(Guo, 2012).
With the importance of input, scholars (Kaur, 2019;
Luís, 2017) have also considered the digitalisation of
teaching materials and its connection with the rapid
expansion of technologies in society and education
(Hashim, 2018; Selwyn, 2012). In this sense, teenagers’
familiarity with Web 2.0 and their tendency to use
social media to communicate (Lenhart et al., 2010)
suggests that these platforms could be appropriate
teaching tools, especially when dealing with secondary
school students (Faizi et al., 2013; Greenhow & Lewin,
2 These principles state that SLA instruction needs to ensure
that learners (1) develop both a rich repertoire of formulaic expressions and a rule-based competence and focus on (2) meaning and
(3) form; that it should (4) be predominantly directed at developing
implicit knowledge of the L2 while not neglecting explicit knowledge,
and (5) take into account the order and sequence of acquisition; that
it requires (6) extensive L2 input and (7) opportunities for output;
that (8) interaction in the L2 is central to developing L2 proficiency;
that instruction needs to take account of (9) individual differences in
learners and (10) the fact that there is a subjective aspect to learning
a new language; and that (11) in assessing learners’ L2 proficiency, it is
important to examine both free and controlled production.
Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Facultad de Ciencias Humanas, Departamento de Lenguas Extranjeras
Analysing the Functionality of Twitter for Science Dissemination in EFL Teaching and Learning
2016). In the case of Spanish higher education, such
a hypothesis relates to the emphasis of the Spanish
curriculum on promoting students’ digital competence
and ICT literacy (Spante et al., 2018). This emphasis
results from global concerns to guide young Internet
users in their use of digital platforms, which materialised
in the establishment of digital competence as one of
the key competencies recognised by the Council of the
European Union in May 2018.
The extended digitalisation of society has required
schools to develop “strategies to support the digital
competences needed for providing high quality teaching
and learning” (Pettersson, 2018, p. 1006). In this sense,
language teaching seems to be an educational area
considerably inclined towards computer-mediated communication or CMC (Ihnatova et al., 2021). Because of
this, introducing digital platforms in the EFL classroom
would require educators to become digitally competent to choose digital teaching materials appropriately
(Johannesen et al., 2014). Therefore, in the understanding
of digital competence as “the set of knowledge, skills,
attitudes, abilities, strategies and awareness that are
required when using ICT . . . and digital media” (Ferrari
et al., 2012, p. 84), both teachers and students need to
become acquainted with the theoretical perspectives
related to CMC, such as digital discourse (Barton &
Lee, 2013; Herring, 2019), multimodality (Page, 2009;
Jewitt et al., 2016), or hyperlinks (Vaughan, 2016; Wood
& Smith, 2004).
Because of students’ recurrent use of digital
platforms, some studies have examined social media
applications within the classroom context (LambtonHoward et al., 2021; Selwyn & Stirling, 2016). One of
the platforms considered in this sense is Twitter,3 a
3 In October 2022, the microblogging platform was purchased
by the South African entrepreneur Elon Musk, under whose ownership
the platform has been subject to several functional and layout changes.
One of the most significant modifications is renaming the platform into
“X”; thus, tweets are now called “posts”. However, I decided to keep the
terms “Twitter” and “tweet(s)” in this paper, considering that both the
corpus gathered and analyses carried out date back to the first semester
microblogging service launched in 2006 in which users
interact with each other by posting 280-maximumcharacter messages called tweets. Apart from its
educational potential (Denker et al., 2018), Twitter “has
integrated itself into [other] important domains of social
life such as journalism, public communication, politics
and activism” (Zappavigna, 2017, p. 206). One of these
specific domains is that of science dissemination: the
process of distributing scientific specialised knowledge
within a non-specialised context, for which Twitter has
recently functioned as a means for the global transfer of
information and the sharing of academic publications
and papers via hyperlinks (Ortega, 2017; Paradis et
al., 2020). Within science dissemination, there exists
a plethora of research concerned with the diffusion
of findings related to biological and environmental
issues (Giannarakis et al., 2016; Scott, 2000), a field
in which social media play a crucial role in “alerting
people about environmental damages, corporate failure
to meet its legal obligations, truthful analysis of new
legislations and steps for protection and preservation of
environments” (Kushwaha, 2015, p. 1). Such awareness
constitutes a crucial element in present-day educational
policies, given their alignment with the Sustainable
Development Goals of the Agenda 2030 (2015) proposed
in the UN 2015 New York Summit in which a world of
equality, justice, and non-discrimination was envisaged
(Agirreazkuenaga, 2020).
Within this scenario of teaching and learning
English, two research questions guide this inquiry:
• RQ1: How do Twitter features and affordances
in the context of science dissemination relate to
curricular requirements regarding EFL teaching?
• RQ2: How could the Twitter features used
for science dissemination be applied in an
EFL context to promote students’ communicative competence and L2 acquisition while
of 2022, that is, before any relevant change in the platform had been
implemented.
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responding to curricular demands on integral
development?
To answer these research questions, this paper
first explores the connection between using science
dissemination tweets for EFL teaching and learning and
fostering students’ integral development. After this, it
examines the potential the tweets have to foster reading
and writing skills, specifically focusing on vocabulary
and grammar. Finally, it studies their functionality to
foster students’ multimodal awareness and the integrated
practice of linguistic skills.
Method
This paper is the second part of a two-fold analysis.
In the first part of such analysis, a closed number of
science dissemination tweets was set as the object
of a generic analysis identifying the characteristics
of science dissemination tweets. In the second part,
which is the object of the present study, an analysis
of the potential of tweets from a pedagogical point
of view is undertaken following two criteria. First, I
analysed the connection between the content in the
tweets and the key competencies for lifelong learning
established by the European Council and adopted in
the Aragonese curriculum. It was considered whether
the topics addressed and the (verbal or visual) form in
which they were presented could be used to practice
any key competencies. Second, the hyperlinks and
linguistic and multimodal features identified in the
generic analysis contrasted with the compulsory content
items that, according to the Aragonese curriculum,
must be taught each academic year to develop each
language skill (listening, reading, speaking, and writing).
Thus, I manually checked whether each generic feature
identified fell into one or many curricular content items
for the four secondary school years.
The choice of tweets as the object of analysis
was motivated by the fact that, nowadays, younger
generations are often qualified as digital natives (Palfrey
& Gasser, 2011). The focus on science dissemination
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within Twitter was due to the primal importance given
in the European educational field to scientific topics, in
general, and environmental issues, in particular, given
the connection of educational plans with Sustainable
Development Goals 11, 13, 14, 15, and 17 of the Agenda
2030 promoted by the United Nations. In this line, to
explore the use of Twitter in the EFL classroom, I selected
two international accounts that address environmental
issues and use English as the primary language for
their international publications: the accounts of the
international non-governmental organisation World
Wildlife Fund (@WWF) and the global campaigning
corporation network Greenpeace (@Greenpeace).
Despite their thematic similarities, these organisations
implement considerably different tactics to address
environmental issues. While Greenpeace—founded in
1971—primarily operates as a denouncing campaigner
independent from companies’ actions, WWF—founded
in 1961—tends to work alongside companies to fight
the environmental crisis.
Selection of the Corpus
Regarding selection methodology, 100 tweets
were manually gathered by taking screenshots from
a computer. As my interest was to focus on two specific Twitter accounts in a certain period, I manually
selected 50 tweets per account following numerical
and chronological criteria. The compilation of tweets
started on February 16th, 2022, and the tweets were
collected, going backwards in time until the set number
was reached. The combination of chronological and
numerical criteria catered for the significant difference in publication frequency between both accounts:
While the timespan of WWF’s selected tweets goes
from January 1st to February 16th, Greenpeace’s only
covers from February 11th to February 16th. All tweets
were extracted from the section “Tweets and replies,”
excluding retweets to focus on Twitter content specifically produced by the accounts.
Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Facultad de Ciencias Humanas, Departamento de Lenguas Extranjeras
Analysing the Functionality of Twitter for Science Dissemination in EFL Teaching and Learning
Results and Discussion
The findings gathered in the previous generic
analysis of tweets for science dissemination led to
insights regarding the exploitation of the corpus for
EFL teaching and learning in the context of Spanish
secondary education. Such insights and their implications
conform to this section, divided into four subsections
that present four possible ways of exploiting the corpus:
(a) to foster students’ integral development, (b) to teach
written comprehension and production, (c) to teach
vocabulary and grammar, and (d) to practice integrated
skills using multimodality.
Fostering Students’
Integral Development
The generic analysis of the corpus (Sancho-Ortiz,
2022) resulted in this paper by opening up the possibility
of exploring the potential applications of science
dissemination tweets in EFL teaching and learning. One
of the critical aspects identified in that generic analysis
is the constant address of environmental and social
issues. This somehow relates to a growing interest in the
European context in renovating environmental policies
and the resulting effort in the educational community
to make students aware of the importance of their
role in the environmental crisis (Bayrhuber & Mayer,
2000). The promotion of students’ awareness as regards
globally relevant issues can also be linked with another
policy change experienced in the educational field: the
formulation of the key competencies recognised by the
European Council in May 2018 and the 21st-century skills
established in the KSAVE (Knowledge, Skills, Attitudes,
Values, and Ethics) model (Binkley et al., 2012). The
key competencies and students’ awareness of global
responsibility are fundamental to their development
as competent human beings. Under this premise, and
considering the topics addressed in the tweets gathered,
the first insight in this paper shows that EFL teachers
can take the corpus as a productive source of material
through which to promote students’ development of
21st-century skills and key competencies advocated for
in new European educational policies—also considered
as crucial educational requirements in the Aragonese
curriculum within the Spanish framework.
Among the different competencies to foster, the most
apparent connection in content comes with developing
mathematical and scientific competence, as students
may need to interpret scientific data and terminology
from environmental issues. For such interpretation,
students must uphold a critical analytical position,
believed to be the essence of critical thinking, one of the
skills included in the KSAVE model. See, for instance,
Figure 1. Based on this image, students could be asked
to reflect on the tweet’s statistical data (percentages) and
hypothesise the reasons behind the amount of plastic
reaching the ocean through rivers.
Figure 1. WWF’s Tweet about Plastic Pollution
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Apart from the mathematical competence, reflecting
on the origin of a specific environmental problem—
such as plastic pollution in Figure 1—could enhance
students’ entrepreneurship competence, as they could
be asked to devise solutions for such issues. This would
require them to be creative and innovative, two skills
of the KSAVE model that constitute entrepreneurship
competence. Another connection is that to achieve
their science dissemination purposes and promote
active participation in their causes; the two accounts
emphasise the sense of belonging to a global community,
which establishes links with socio-civic competence and
the sense of citizenship and social responsibility of the
KSAVE model. Moreover, all these reflective tasks would
become efficient means to both promote the linguistic
communication competence—inherent in any English
course—and introduce a communicative approach to
English teaching, as students would be focusing on
negotiating meaning rather than on merely learning
grammatical aspects (Ellis & Shintani, 2014). Similarly,
using authentic data in a digital format (tweets) in a
classroom context entails that students would work on
their digital competence and the use of ICTs by learning
to find, critically analyse, and process information
through a digital platform such as Twitter—all of which
is given considerable relevance within the KSAVE model
(Binkley et al., 2012).
In addition to connecting with key curricular competencies and 21st-century skills, science dissemination
tweets may have further applications, such as addressing
identity issues related to the social and personal development of the learner. The generic analysis of the corpus
(Sancho-Ortiz, 2022) demonstrates that, despite their
scientific and, therefore, theoretically neutral nature,
the WWF and Greenpeace accounts sacrifice scientific
objectivity in their tweets to embody their corporative
principles and raise environmental issues to public
knowledge. In this way, they gain support and active
participation from their audience. By pointing to these
objectivity alterations in the classroom, teachers could
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make students face biased or intentionally charged
texts so that they understand, first, that not everything
they read online is necessarily true and, second, how
the stance of the author determines the way readers
perceive information, that is, understand the pragmatic
dimension of the communicative competence (Canale
& Swain, 1980). Similarly, science dissemination tweets
could promote students’ reflection on their use of social
media, including creating an online identity and the
reliability of information. This would entail designing
teacher-guided activities considering the age limitation of the platform—above 13 years old—to gradually
introduce students to the dynamics of online communication while highlighting the risks of consuming
biased content, contacting malicious users, or posting
personal content to an audience of millions. The issue
of beyond-the-text meaning found in online discourse
relates to this paper’s second insight: the potential of
science dissemination tweets to teach written comprehension and production.
Teaching Written Comprehension
and Production
The second insight derives from the connection
between the processes undergone by EFL students and
Twitter users when consuming and producing texts.
Concerning text consumption, a similarity has been
found regarding the pre-reading requirements faced by
students and Twitter users and the resulting impact that
these have in choosing specific reading skills to decode
texts. In the same way that Twitter users have a clear
purpose before they choose a tweet to read—seeking
specific information, acquiring general knowledge, or
being entertained (Zhang & Duke, 2008) —EFL learners
need a clearly stated purpose to succeed in reading tasks
(Knutson, 1997). Having been shown that “purpose
affects the reader’s motivation, interest, and manner of
reading” (Knutson, 1997, p. 49), bringing Twitter into
the classroom context could make students realise that
the goal-oriented selecting process they go through as
Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Facultad de Ciencias Humanas, Departamento de Lenguas Extranjeras
Analysing the Functionality of Twitter for Science Dissemination in EFL Teaching and Learning
social media users is precisely the same procedure they
need to follow as L2 learners in their reading tasks.
Another aspect in which Twitter users and L2 students
coincide is their need to identify the author’s stance to
avoid biased content—in the case of Twitter users—and
successfully understand a text—as for L2 learners. In
this context, science dissemination tweets could be
handy tools to evidence the importance of an authorial
stance. This results from the fact that taking advantage
of the semiotic nature of Twitter (Zappavigna, 2017),
the WWF and Greenpeace accounts consciously exploit
multimodality to engage the intended audience in their
denouncing and informative messages and reach their
disseminating purposes more easily (Sancho-Ortiz,
2022). For example, Figures 2 and 3 could be shown to
students to demonstrate that both the WWF and the
Greenpeace accounts resort to the first-person plural
(“our” or “we”) and emoticons (sad face and clapping
hands) to stress the need for urgent global cooperation,
and thus, make their audience feel directly involved in
the issues addressed.
Figure 3. Greenpeace’s Tweet About Ocean
Protection
Figure 2. WWF’s Tweet on Deforestation
Considering the similarities concerning written
comprehension, it could be argued that bringing into
the classroom those reading practices that EFL students
typically carry out outside—such as consuming tweets—
could teach them how to read more comprehensively
and become competent internet users. This latter idea
of educating competent users relates to the curricular
requirement of fostering students’ digital competence
by teaching them how to filter information in the digital
net. This translates into making students aware, first, of
their exploitation of digital affordances such as hashtags
as information sources and, second, of the risks of not
using these digital means critically, thus contributing
to developing critical thinking skills.
Apart from the similarities regarding reading,
a parallelism has been found in the steps followed
by Twitter users and EFL learners to produce texts.
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Within the last decades, the context of EFL teaching
has experienced significant changes as regards the
conception of writing proficiency (Hasan & Akhand,
2010). These changes primarily derive from a shift
from evaluating writing as a product to conceiving it
as a process (Brown & Lee, 2015) subdivided into five
phases—pre-writing, drafting, revising, editing, and
publishing (McKensie & Tomkins, 1984)—which, to a
certain extent, coincide with the steps official accounts
in Twitter are expected to follow when posting a tweet.
In this sense, both L2 students who are instructed in
the process-writing approach and the users of official
Twitter accounts have a pre-writing stage in which
they plan the topic they will address in their writing
and consider the resources available to do so. Similarly,
Twitter could enhance the importance of the drafting,
revising, and editing stages, as the platform allows
users to save their messages as drafts and edit them as
many times as needed before sharing them. Therefore,
students could replicate these steps when composing
a text in the L2 and posting a tweet. Such imitation
practice would also prove the significance of publishing
as a necessary stage by demonstrating to students that,
in essence, every text is written to be published—either
through a social networking site where it is shared with
an audience of millions or in an English classroom,
where the teachers and classmates become the audience.
Adding up to their potential to enhance the
importance of conceiving writing as a process, science
dissemination tweets could be used to provide students
with guided opportunities for output production—one
of the core principles of SLA (Ellis & Shintani, 2014)
and CLT (Brown & Lee, 2015; Lightbown, 2003). In
this context, the tweets could function as a model or
WAGOLL (What a Good One Looks Like) for scaffolding
to facilitate students’ task of crafting their tweets. By
doing this, students would understand that regardless
of the apparent informality of a text and as claimed
in genre theory (Bhatia, 1993), every text belongs
to a specific genre and, as such, presents a series of
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generic features that define it. Moreover, by analysing
and producing tweets, students would practice their
multimodal competence and become aware of mode
convergence’s implications when making meaning,
an aspect of digital literacy essential for present-day
communication (Kalantzis & Cope, 2015).
Teaching Vocabulary and Grammar
The connection between the real-life content of the
tweets and the topics addressed in an EFL classroom
not only allows teachers to foster key competencies and
21st-century skills but also makes the tweets an enriching
source of authentic L2 materials to teach vocabulary and
grammar. Exposure to authentic L2 input constitutes one
of the core principles of CLT and SLA, for it adds to the
establishment of meaning and real-life communication
aims as the basis of the learning process (Richards, 2006).
Knowing this, Twitter could be considered a specifically
productive source of vocabulary items because its
constantly updated content presents unlimited examples
of useful vocabulary (Sancho-Ortiz, 2022). In the case
of science dissemination tweets, these texts’ scientific
and specialised nature endows their vocabulary with
a certain degree of complexity that might be difficult
to handle at certain educational stages. However, as
tweets primarily aim to disseminate knowledge, it is
taken for granted that their authors will try to adapt
the register and complexity of their explanations to the
knowledge of their non-specialised audience, facilitating
the decoding and inferring processes students undergo
to understand the L2 message. Apart from this, the
generic analysis of the corpus shows that most tweets
are examples of multimodal ensembles that include
images and emojis whose function is to rephrase textual
meaning. Such a multimodal nature might also simplify
the decoding process as learners could rely on the
visual mode to understand the meaning of specific
words. This is only plausible when vocabulary appears
in a specific context, a highly recommendable strategy
when teaching vocabulary (Brown & Lee, 2015). For
Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Facultad de Ciencias Humanas, Departamento de Lenguas Extranjeras
Analysing the Functionality of Twitter for Science Dissemination in EFL Teaching and Learning
example, in Figure 4, the photo of a person in a location
full of plastic waste is included to ensure the reader
understands the meaning of the sentence “Turkey is
not a plastic dump!”
Figure 4. Greenpeace’s Tweet About Plastic
Dumpsites
By relying on images to infer meaning, students
would be working on their visual literacy while
practising pre-reading strategies and complying with
the requirements of CLT: They will be both focusing
on meaning negotiation (Ellis & Shintani, 2014) and
avoiding literal translation, a learning practise generally
used in traditional methodologies which at times is
believed to hinder students’ reasoning process (Ellis
& Shintani, 2014). In the same way that seeing lexical
items in an authentic context of use can facilitate
learning for L2 students, exposure to various actual
grammar forms can allow them to understand the
abstract theoretical notions explained in the classroom
regarding the function and formation of verbal tenses.
In the case of the scientific dissemination tweets, the
generic analysis demonstrated a predominance of verbs
in the indicative mood, mainly present and past tense.
Thus, this type of tweet could explain the differences
between and functions of such verbal forms. Thereby,
students could be asked to reason why these scientific
texts use present tenses and the implications this has as
regards objectivity. This reasoning process would relate
to the development of scientific competence.
Teaching Multimodal Awareness: A
Means to Practice Integrated Skills
The presentation of grammar and vocabulary in
context is not the only issue related to analysing English
teaching and learning materials. Indeed, many studies
(Hanifa, 2018; Rodrigues, 2015) have examined the
role of textbooks in teaching and learning dynamics
and the possible risks of using them ineffectively. In
this sense, the last insight in the present paper shows
the resemblance between the design of textbooks as
inherently multimodal teaching tools and science
dissemination tweets as texts with conscious exploitation
of multimodality to make meaning (Sancho-Ortiz,
2022). In the last decades, there has been an increase in
the use of visual images in English textbooks (Kress &
van Leeuwen, 2021) and a change in the conception of
written pages as visual rather than verbal units (Bezemer
& Kress, 2010), which have allowed for the potential of
textbooks’ multimodal nature to be considered within
the teaching context (Mushtaq et al., 2022). Despite this
preference for multimodal designs and the belief of some
that textbooks are fundamental elements in language
teaching (e.g., Cunningsworth, 1995), textbooks might
be perceived as inefficient material sources that fail to
consider the complexity of language learning and the
heterogeneity of students’ individual needs (Allwright,
1981). Hence, introducing innovative materials extracted
from multimodal digital platforms and designing tasks
oriented to enhance students’ multimodal awareness and
literacies (Kalantzis & Cope, 2015) seem to be effective
solutions to the inconveniences of textbooks. This would
entail taking students’ self-taught ICT competencies,
Profile: Issues Teach. Prof. Dev., Vol. 26 No. 1, Jan-Jun, 2024. ISSN 1657-0790 (printed) 2256-5760 (online). Bogotá, Colombia. Pages 133-147
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Sancho-Ortiz
which derive from their knowledge of social media
and networking sites, as the initial step to developing
linguistic competence.
Concerning the functionality of the science dissemination tweets to teach multimodal awareness, the
corpus analysis (Sancho-Ortiz, 2022) proves that the
WWF and Greenpeace accounts conveniently use mode
convergence to reach their disseminating purposes.
Accordingly, to practice multimodal awareness, students
could be required to identify the reason why each tweet
introduces specific visual elements (e.g., emojis), specialised scientific terms (e.g., “plastic pollution”), or a
precise organisation of content in different paragraphs.
Asking students to analyse aspects such as the choice
of vocabulary (verbal mode), images (visual mode),
or a specific layout (spatial mode) would allow them
to reflect on the purpose behind mode convergence
and become aware of the importance of identifying
multimodal patterns when consuming online content.
When approached from the perspective of multiliteracies, the examples of multimodality found in
science dissemination tweets can also serve to practise
integrated skills in the EFL classroom. Understanding
that learners make and process meaning in different
modes, languages, and discourses (Kalantzis & Cope,
2015) entails that they should be confronted with a
wider variety of communication forms than those
offered in traditional textbooks. This will allow lessons
to comply more easily with the CLT tenet of integrated
skills since, through digital multimodal texts, students
would be exposed to varied meaning-making modes.
For example, the previous generic analysis of the corpus
shows that many tweets contain images or emojis that
reinforce the verbal message and, thus, can be used to
teach vocabulary. These same visual elements can also
promote discussion activities about the design of such
images or the topics addressed, fostering both speaking
and the development of students’ visual literacy.
Similarly, given the interactive nature of the platform, students could simultaneously practice reading
142
and writing by being asked to craft their responses to
the tweets as if they were Twitter users. For such writing,
they would have to consider the platform’s affordances
(e.g., character constraint or the use of hashtags), so
they would work on their digital competence while
exploring generic conventions. Figure 5 is an example of
a tweet that may be used for a reading-writing activity:
Students would have to first read the tweet’s content
and the video and then write their own tweet about
their city, arguing whether it is plastic smart or not.
Figure 5. WWF’s Tweet on Plastic Smart Cities
In the case of Figure 5, the video included has no
sound and, therefore, could not be specifically used to
practice listening skills. However, many other tweets
containing videos with music and oral explanations
could become the object of listening activities. Students
could be asked to watch the video and orally comment
on it to practise listening and speaking or to answer
a series of written questions about the clip to practice
writing. Apart from this, as multimodal ensembles
themselves, some videos also contain examples of the
gestural mode, which express significant paralinguistic
meanings that students need to be aware of according to
curricular demands. Similarly, these videos make very
innovative use of spacing and visual elements such as
colours, as in Figure 5, in which WWF probably avoids
Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Facultad de Ciencias Humanas, Departamento de Lenguas Extranjeras
Analysing the Functionality of Twitter for Science Dissemination in EFL Teaching and Learning
placing the message in the middle of the image to give
prominence to the picture of the earth. In the case of
this tweet, to work on their visual and digital literacies,
students would have to reflect on the choice of yellow
as the colour for input enhancement, the realism of
the earth image, and the way light and shade are used
to direct the viewer’s attention to the verbal and visual
elements.
Not only is the multimodal format of science dissemination tweets advantageous for students in their
practice of integrated skills but also for teachers in their
need to adapt to students’ individual needs. In this
sense, there exists a parallel between the way science
dissemination Twitter accounts (@WWF and @Greenpeace) use mode convergence to reach a heterogenous
audience as broad as possible and the way teachers
resort to varied materials containing different semiotic
modes to respond to their students’ learning styles and
needs. Although, as has been previously said, textbooks
do rely on mode convergence to facilitate learning,
one single tweet can contain the same information
expressed—and sometimes extended—in (multimodal)
ways that students are more accustomed to consuming.
This can be seen in Figure 5, where the information in
the hashtag #StopPlasticPollution is rephrased through
the stop sign and water glass emoji. Tweets seem likely
to provide teachers with diverse ideas to address specific topics according to major learning styles. These
include designing tasks based on producing tweets for
kinaesthetic learners, listening activities with videos
for auditory learners, and analysing visual elements
for visual learners.
The visual layout of tweets can also serve to design
activities for students with specific educational needs
(SEN). For instance, the paraphrasing function of emoji
(Figure 5) might allow students with autism spectrum
disorder to learn the meaning of certain words more
easily, given their enhanced visual processing abilities
(Alnemr, 2022). Similarly, by presenting input in
different formats (e.g., visually synthesising images as
the plastic dump in Figure 4) and using short-length
tweets, students with language-related disabilities, such
as developmental language disorder and dyslexia, would
better understand complex abstract notions (e.g., plastic
pollution). The multimodal dynamism characterising
tweets can thus be a productive means to enhance
students’ multimodal awareness and visual literacy,
facilitate integrated skills practice, and adapt materials
to students’ needs.
Overall, science dissemination tweets seem to be
highly productive in EFL teaching and learning as they
provide students with authentic and updated materials
to enhance their communicative competence. Not only
does the content and digital format of the tweets allow
for students’ personal development—which includes
the acquisition of key competencies and 21st-century
skills—but it also facilitates the understanding of formal
linguistic aspects (vocabulary and grammar) and the
practice of communicative skills (either relying on
multimodal elements or focusing on individual skills
such as reading or writing).
Conclusions
The English teaching and learning scenario has
experienced several changes in the last decades,
favouring innovative sources for teaching materials, such
as social networking platforms. Bearing this in mind,
this study has analysed whether science dissemination
Twitter accounts could be used as English teaching and
learning tools in the present-day EFL context. One
specific aspect observed in this analysis is the utility of
these accounts as a means for students to explore the
pragmatic and sociolinguistic dimensions of online
communication and fully develop their communicative
competence. This paper has proved that not only does
this type of text facilitate the acquisition of students’
communicative competence by providing them with
opportunities to practice varied linguistic skills using
authentic materials, but it also enhances their personal
development given the digital format of the tweets and
Profile: Issues Teach. Prof. Dev., Vol. 26 No. 1, Jan-Jun, 2024. ISSN 1657-0790 (printed) 2256-5760 (online). Bogotá, Colombia. Pages 133-147
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Sancho-Ortiz
the global and transversal nature of the environmental
topics addressed in them. The introduction of these
tweets in the EFL classroom, thus, contributes to the
overall purpose of education, that is, to make students
competent and civic citizens of the world, as working
with these posts requires them first to learn how to be
critical users of a digital platform, and second, become
aware of their role in hindering the consequences of
climate change.
This paper has also shown that the multimodal
nature of science dissemination tweets plays a fundamental role in promoting students’ communicative
competence as it allows them to practice communicative skills in an integrated manner. Similarly, the
consideration of digital multimodal texts (tweets)
from a pedagogical perspective shows how working
on mode convergence in the EFL classroom could entail
the dismantlement of the assumption that teaching
a language is a purely linguistic phenomenon. This
involves considering and making students reflect on
how different modes (namely the verbal and visual)
are used in this—and other—digital platforms to compensate for the limitations of online communication
(e.g., character constraints or the absence of instant
feedback). Fostering multimodal awareness would
also entail addressing students’ multiliteracies, as this
awareness serves as a means to introduce students to
the multiplicity of communication channels found in
present-day communication and the integration of
diverse cultural perspectives seen in the broad scope
of social media audiences. Apart from this, despite
some slight considerations introduced in this paper,
it is yet to be further explored in greater detail how
the multimodal nature of Twitter might or might not
be adequately effective for EFL teaching to students
with SEN.
In all, this study has proved that science dissemination tweets can be productively exploited to teach and
learn English as they open up the possibility to work
on crucial 21st-century skills such as digital literacy and
144
multimodal competence, in which students will need to
be fully competent by the end of their learning process
to face their professional future. Thus, it contributes to
making students understand that mastering a language
requires dealing not only with textual information but
also with the contextual and paralinguistic aspects that
interrelate in any communicative situation. For further
research, it would be interesting to consider how Twitter
(or other social media) users exploit online discourse
and digital media to deal with other topics outside the
context of science dissemination. Moreover, whether
these topics should or should not be brought into the
EFL classroom to facilitate students’ acquisition process
will also need to be discussed.
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About the Author
Ana E. Sancho-Ortiz is a PhD grant holder in the Department of English and German Studies at
Universidad de Zaragoza (Spain) and a member of the InterGEDI research group (PID2021-122303NB-100).
Her research deals with social media discourse (Twitter and Instagram) and its educational applications.
Profile: Issues Teach. Prof. Dev., Vol. 26 No. 1, Jan-Jun, 2024. ISSN 1657-0790 (printed) 2256-5760 (online). Bogotá, Colombia. Pages 133-147
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