ABSTRACT
With the pervasive adoption and increasing influence of social media and mobile devices on modern lives, educators in the field of teaching Chinese a foreign language (CFL) have been seeking ways to harness its potential to enhance student learning. This chapter first presents a general introduction of theories and frameworks of Computer-assisted Language Learning (CALL) with a focus on the latest Social Media Language Learning (SMLL) in the field of CFL. It then reviews the major findings of recent studies on the use of social media tools, such as Facebook (Wang and Vasquez 2014), WeChat (Luo and Yang 2016), and Weibo (Diao 2014; Tsung and Wang 2015), in CFL classes from three major categories: perception of learners and teachers, user experience and effectiveness of such applications. After that, an empirical study on using WeChat to conduct an inter-institutional group discussion at the intermediate level is discussed with detailed quantitative analysis and pedagogical implications. This chapter ends with a purview of the future of SMLL in CFL settings. It is suggested that, by integrating best practices and the pedagogical principles of second language acquisition (Ellis 2003; Gass 1988) into a well-constructed design, social media tools can be utilized to make authentic input more accessible, promote more meaningful interactions, and create more open peer learning to achieve higher performance.
