Abstract

In recent years, Twitter has commanded research attention in domains from digital sociology to language pedagogy. This paper explores how daily tweeting allows Japanese university students at the intermediate end of English as a Second Language (ESL) studies to exercise and improve their interactive competencies. The aim was threefold: first, to increase both production and exposure, leading to improved definition of the identity of the L2 user self. Second, to extend learning beyond the classroom and class times, creating a technologically enhanced transformative pedagogy that transferred power to the learner. Lastly, to promote the interactive capability of students through interactions between students, with the teacher, and extending to the global Twitter community for social justice pedagogy. The author uses Discourse Analysis (DA) to contextualize both the methods and findings, and offers suggestions for using Social Network Analysis (SNA) to uncover the interactive gains of using Twitter in this way.