A Critical Analysis of Social Media Oral Messaging as a Pedagogical Tool to Enhance the Communication Skills in Al-Fajr University College for Science and Technology - Khartoum State - Sudan

Abstract

Despite availability of the resources and channels, EFL teachers still struggle of providing enough opportunities for their students to interact verbally. This study aims at enhancing EFL students’ verbal language practices outside classroom through utilizing the communicative platforms of the social media (WhatsApp sample). The study employed the descriptive analytical method and used questionnaire and pre-and-posttests as tools for data collections. The Participants are divided into two groups; experimental group represents group ‘B’ and control group represents the group ‘A’. The participants of Group B intend to be communicated via voice messages on WhatsApp, while Group A’s participants used to communicate via text messages. The data analyzed by the statistical program (SPSS) and revealed that the participants who underwent the voice messages on WhattsApp treatment significantly outperformed those who underwent in text messages on WhatsApp. Hence, utilizing voice messages on WhatsApp chat group can be recommended as an efficient technique in enhancing EFL learners’ verbal interactions outside classroom. Moreover, EFL students have many challenges impact on their communication via WhatsApp audio messaging such as expensiveness of a good package of internet service, instability of electricity power supply, high price of the smart phones. Based on the these results, it recommends utilizing WhatsApp chat group particularly via voice messages as an effective means of enhancing verbal interaction among EFL students outside classroom. Because EFL traditional classroom is no longer more appropriate in offering sufficient opportunities for EFL learners’ verbal interaction.