Effects of using Twitter on students’ motivation and learning performance in Chinese

Based on the course evaluations in the past years, students of Chinese Beginners Course often complained that they had little chance to practice Chinese in a social context. To solve this problem, we plan to conduct an experiment with using micro-blogging tool: Twitter. Since students of this course have limited language proficiency at level A1 and A2 based on Common European Framework, they can only communicate in short sentences in Chinese. Twitter that provides short-turn exchanges with a limit of 140 characters suits ideally for this purpose. We will investigate the effects that student use Twitter to prepare for the final exam on students’ motivation and learning performance.

Prior to the experiment, students first fill in the motivation questionnaire and then they receive a training for twenty-five minutes during which they learn how to tweet and self-assess their confidence on each topic included in the course. Then students make a plan of their Twitter activities based on this self-assessment. Every student should at least produce five tweets and respond to five others’ tweets each week. The data collection will take five weeks. After the final exam, each student fills in the same motivation questionnaire and one evaluation questionnaire that measures student’s perception of usefulness and satisfaction with this Twitter activity.

The data analysis plan is as follows. We will perform content analysis to gauge types of communication and topics of their tweets to understand how students use Twitter to practice Chinese. To know whether using Twitter has effects on students’ motivation of learning Chinese we will compare the differences between two measures of the same motivation questionnaire. To find out whether using Twitter is related to learning performance, we will calculate the correlations between i) frequencies of different types of tweets, ii) usefulness, iii) satisfaction, and scores of final exam.