作者
Hibah Aladsani
发表日期
2018
机构
The University of Sheffield
简介
This thesis explores how Saudi female university students use Twitter for educational purposes and their opinions about its educational potential. In addition, it examines how students use Twitter to present their academic identities and how Twitter affects their academic discourse. I focused on female students because I wanted to investigate how Twitter affects how they communicate with the opposite gender in general and in particular academically, and how it could help Saudi women make their voices heard in a society largely dominated by men. This study used a qualitative methodology. The data were collected through semi- structured interviews with 15 participants from King Faisal University (KFU) and a content analysis of their Twitter posts. The data were thematically analysed using NVivo. This study found that the students’ use of Twitter was mainly student-directed; for the most part, they did not use Twitter because teachers requested them to. Moreover, the participants used Twitter for educational purposes in two ways: to support their university studies and to support their language learning. The study also found that the participants typically presented three components of their academic identities: They shared their academic disciplines, identified themselves as students at KFU, and used academic hashtags. While interpreting the findings of this research question, I found Goffman’s (1959) theories to be helpful for understanding how the students used Twitter to present the academic aspects of their identities. Furthermore, Goffman’s theories were also useful for interpreting the findings of the first research question. The participants …
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