The Appeal of Social Media to Language Learning - A look at the State of the Art

Résumé

This text provides the contextual and notional background of the articles selected for the special issue "Social media and language learning: (r) evolution?". It begins with a definition of a number of terms that dominate current discourse such as "social media", "web 2.0", "social web", "social networking sites" and "web 2.0 language learning communities" . The objective is not to "reinvent the wheel" by suggesting new definitions but to synthesize the dominant definitions and to compare them with concepts close to the literature in the field of Alao. Three key aspects of web 2.0 technologies are then discussed (user participation, openness and networking effects). These three characteristics were, admittedly, already present with the technologies that preceded social media, so we take a look at how or not they take on a radically different meaning in the age of social media. A number of avenues for research are discussed in the last part of the text.