Learning through WhatsApp: students’ beliefs, L2 pragmatic development and interpersonal relationships

Abstract

By using small focus group discussions, the present study aims to gain insight into students’ perceptions about the impact of WhatsApp use in their learning process. More specifically, this study presents a cross-cultural analysis of British and Spanish university students’ personal beliefs about the effectiveness of using WhatsApp to complete group tasks outside the classroom. In so doing, this research represents a step forward in technology-enhanced instruction insofar as it not only incorporates the voices of learners themselves, but also contrasts students’ beliefs with their group interactions on WhatsApp. The exploration of these WhatsApp interactions makes it possible to argue that the use of WhatsApp does not seem to create a natural context for non-native language users to produce contextualise relevant utterances while interacting with native English speakers. Furthermore, the results show that the lack of pragmatic competence on the part of the participants prevents them from communicating effectively. These pragmatic failures, in turn, have a negative impact on their interpersonal relationships and make them develop negative opinions towards the use of WhatsApp as a learning tool.

Keywords:

• Interpersonal communication
• pragmatic competence
• students’ beliefs
• technology-enhanced communication
• WhatsApp

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Given that students in previous courses had reported that it was always difficult to find the time to meet while doing the project, smartphone software was selected due to its simple operation, low cost, availability and immediacy. This way students were connected and could sort out any problems as quickly as possible since all the members could answer questions or doubts right after the problem was posed in the chat.

2 Given that the study was done in a Spanish context, this justifies the fact that the number of Spanish participants is much greater than that of British participants.

3 Although Erasmus students from Germany and Italy also enrol in this course, these interactions were not analysed as the number of these students was not sufficiently representative to create a new analytical category.

4 All of the examples provided have been copied verbatim without any corrections.

5 Acronym for “bad-mannered”

6 Since the part of the task this student has to work on is not right, he cannot continue working causing a delay in the development of the group task. (see section 3.1)

7 Although social network sites have integrated chat into their services, participants in the study pointed out they never chatted with their group mates on Facebook Messenger or any other social network if they wanted an immediate answer.

8 The British participants come from the university of Manchester and Portsmouth,