Using a Ubiquitous Digital Platform to Teach English for Specific Purposes (ESP)

Abstract

Teaching English for specific purposes is sometimes quite a daunting challenge for most of the teachers in any part of the world despite their personal motivation, expertise and availability of the best of the resources. With the rapid encroachment of digital technology on all fields of academic teaching and learning, it becomes all the more incumbent for educators to have effective strategies to incorporate and exploit the ubiquitous and popular digital platforms to teach their “digital native” students to have better results. Considering the paramount influence of these digital platforms and social media, this study aims at exploring the potent effect of Facebook as one of the pervasive digital platforms to teach ESP to Saudi students at university level. The experiment established several findings of interest which led to the conclusion that ubiquitous digital platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp do have a revelatory potential to ameliorate academic and professional learning.