ABSTRACT

Social media, such as Facebook, has been increasingly incorporated into the L2 writing classroom. Influenced by cognitively-orientated Second Language Acquisition (SLA) scholarship, classroom studies on Facebook and L2 writing tend to focus on testing the effectiveness of the technical tool for improving student writing as measured by native speaker norms. As Facebook use is both a cognitive and a social activity, in this chapter, a New Literacy Studies approach was adopted to explore the pedagogical affordances of Facebook for academic literacy development. In a first-year English course at a Taiwanese university, a Facebook group was created, where fifty students shared drafts of their academic writing as well as their life experiences. The discursive strategies used by students on Facebook show not only their awareness of genre and register but also their mobility across genre and register boundaries for creativity and identity work. Such literate practice demonstrates translingual subject positions among some students. After sorting students’ Facebook posts into academic and non-academic categories, it was found that these two types of discourse shaped students’ academic writing in distinct ways.