The effects of symmetric and asymmetric social networks on second language communication

Abstract

This study investigated the effects of Facebook and Twitter on foreign language (Chinese) learners’ written production in both short- (10 days) and long-term (50 days) pseudo-experimental settings. Adopting two concepts (i.e. symmetric vs. asymmetric) from matrix theory in social network analysis, we categorized Facebook as a symmetric social networking site (SNS) and Twitter as an asymmetric SNS. Results show that Facebook participants were more conservative or not highly engaged in building their social connections. In both settings, Facebook participants posted more sentences than Twitter participants per day, and more posts on Facebook were interactive. The Facebook participants believed more strongly that reading others’ posts improved their reading skills. Facebook also displayed evidence on promoting explicit corrective feedback. More interestingly, Facebook appeared to be a more dynamic system; the quality of writing seemed to change over time. There were more grammatical errors on Facebook than on Twitter in both settings. In the long-term setting (not in the short-term setting), a moderate positive correlation was found between the number of characters and the number of grammar errors for Facebook, but not for Twitter. We conclude that symmetric SNSs facilitate more interactions, potentially providing a more effective platform for peer-to-peer corrective feedback compared to asymmetric SNSs.

Keywords:

• Symmetric social network
• asymmetric social network
• L2 learning
• Facebook
• Twitter

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Elinore Fresh and Yu-Ning Lai for their help with data collection and data coding. We thank Han Xu & I-Chun Peir for participant recruitment and Liangfei Qiu for valuable suggestions on research design. We would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on previous drafts of this paper. The research was conducted while the first author was faculty at a major public university in Southeastern U.S.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jing Z. Paul

Dr. Jing Z. Paul received her Ph.D in Chinese Linguistics from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She is an Assistant Professor of Chinese and the director of the Asian Studies program at Agnes Scott College. Her research interests include the study of language-specific patterns (speech and gesture) in expressing motion events, sound symbolism, and second language acquisition.

Eric Friginal

Dr. Eric Friginal is an Associate Professor in Applied Linguistics at Georgia State University. He specializes in applied corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics, cross-cultural communication, distance learning, discipline-specific writing, bilingual education, and the analysis of spoken professional discourse. He is the author of ‘The Language of Outsourced Call Centers: A Corpus-Based Study of Cross-Cultural Communication’ and special issue editor of Corpora’s ‘Twenty-Five Years of Biber’s Multi-Dimensional Analysis.’ His recent book, ‘Corpus-Based Sociolinguistics: A Guide for Students’ (2014, Routledge) is co-authored with his doctoral student, Jack Hardy.