THE PRACTICE OF MICROBLOGGING

This study reports on the use of the microblogging tool, Twitter, in an intensive English advanced grammar course in a higher educational setting. The author used the tool with 49 students over a 1-year period from September 2010-December 2011, producing more than 3500 tweets. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected and triangulated. Results suggest that microblogging may be used to help students notice target language features by providing them with ample opportunities during input, output, and interaction, due to such factors as task structure, audience presence, mediating tools and corrective feedback exchanges with the instructor (Schmidt, 1990, 1993, 1995) . Further results suggest that microblogging may aid in the proceduralization of new grammatical constructions as well as long-term memory consolidation, particularly for visual learners.