Abstract:
With the exponential growth in internet, the social media affordance has dominated the lifestyles of
the undergraduates in Sri Lanka, and by integrating social media platforms in to teaching English,
learning will be more appealing even to unmotivated learners in the Faculty of Islamic Studies and
Arabic Language (FIA). The main objective of this paper is to examine whether Social Media can be
used as a pedagogical tool to enhance the English language skills of the undergraduates of FIA.
Adopting a quantitative approach, an online questionnaire was administered among the 2nd and 3rd
year undergraduates of FIA using email. Quantitative data collected from the respondents was
critically analysed using Excel and SPSS. The findings reveal that the undergraduates devote
approximately 72 minutes daily on social media, which is three times more than the time spent on
traditional media. In considering social media usage, around 96% of respondents use WhatsApp and
72% of them use YouTube. Facebook and Twitter are used by 52% and 26% respectively. In
considering the preferred language, interestingly, 46% type English texts in English letters and an
equal percent type Tamil/Sinhala in English letters and another 8% type Tamil/Sinhala in
Tamil/Sinhala letters. In seeking information and clarifying doubts in English language, Google
search was ranked first with 94% and the next was YouTube videos with 32%. The T-Testing result
reveals that social media helps the undergraduates to improve their spoken and reading skills but
writing skills are not significantly improved. The study concludes that social media affordance is a
preferred platform that can be used to enhance the undergraduates’ English language skills as almost
all of them show familiarity and preference to Social Media. It is notable that undergraduates use
social media mostly to retrieve and share information rather than create content and get news.
