Exploring the use of Emerging Social Media Platforms for Language Teaching

This study explores the differential adoption of newer social media sites for English language teaching in eleven countries and determines prevailing teaching practices and geographical differences. Administered in descriptive survey research, the study sampled forty purposively stratified English language teachers through an online Google Forms questionnaire of demographic items closed Likert-scale items on platform usage and pedagogy, and one open-ended question to obtain qualitative data. Pilot testing had been conducted with five experienced teachers following which the instrument had been administered during Week 1, and two official reminders had been conducted in Weeks 2 and 3, with a total of forty completed responses being received. Results showed that the most frequently used multifunctional "Other" platforms were WhatsApp, Teams, and Telegram (M = 4.28), followed by Discord (M = 3.83) and TikTok (M = 3.48), whereas Twitch was not significant (M = 1.68). Instructionally, micro-tasks (M = 4.38) and multimodal projects (M = 3.92) were used most, live discussion and peer feedback moderately, and gamified tasks the least. Regional trends indicated high-bandwidth environments prefer multimodal collaboration and low-bandwidth environments prefer lightweight micro-tasks and voice-only communication. These results have immediate implications for platform and strategy preferences and reveal the interplay between technological affordances and contextual limitations. The study concludes that even infrastructure and professional training of specialized type are required to maximize social-media integration within language teaching.