A QUANTITATIVE STUDY OF THE PERCEIVED IMPACT OF SOCIAL MEDIA NETWORKS ON BAHRAINI USERS’ ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNING

The various facets and networks of social media have had significantly phenomenal influence on the individual life and on the societal, economic, and political status of their users. The linguistic discourse of interlocutors on social media has also been influenced. The current study aims at measuring how the English language learning process of non-native Bahrainis has been affected by the use of social media. To explore such effects, a quantitative methodological measure was used in the form of an online questionnaire administered to a random sample of L2 Bahrainis. Responses from 330 respondents from different age groups and gender types were analysed using measures of central tendency and other statistical measures such as t-tests and ANOVA using SPSS. Findings have revealed that the utilization of social media has been perceived to have positively impacted interlocutors’ lexical variation, writing style, reading skills, and communication skills. These findings were subjective to variables related to gender, age, and the multimodality of particular social media facets. Accordingly, some significant implications and recommendations are drawn, the most important of which is the provision of mechanisms to ensure the effective utilisation and employment of social media in the pedagogical practices in L2 contexts.