The Roles of English Language and Imagined Communities of a Facebook Group

Abstract

Social network sites are the networked public places for university students. The most famous social network site in Malaysia for university students is Facebook. University students spend a lot of their time navigating collapsed contexts with global and local audience. Thus, Facebook is the most appropriate site to investigate ESL learning acquisition through L2 learners’ interactions and digital footprints. The study investigates the roles of English language and the types of imagined communities of ten L2 learners at a public university. Transcripts of a Facebook group’s online discussion and semi-structured interviews were analysed using qualitative data software Atlas.ti 7. The findings reveal that the key informants are invested to learn English due to its roles in Malaysia. English language has four dominant roles such as the language for their future employment, the language of instruction, the lingua franca and a tool of empowerment. The research also indicates the imagined communities of the key participants are fluent local speakers, fluent non-native speakers and native speakers. The results of the study provide present needs of ESL learners that will enable insights to language instructors, course designers and curriculum designers in facilitating effective language acquisition. instructions give you basic guidelines for preparing camera-ready papers for conference proceedings. Use this document as a template if you are using Microsoft Word 6.0 or later. Otherwise, use this document as an instruction set. The electronic file of your paper will be formatted further. Define all symbols used in the abstract. Do not cite references in the abstract.