Twitter as an online educational community in the Spanish literature classroom

Research on social media in the foreign language classroom has grown significantly in the last 10 years. However, there continues to be a gap in how social media, Twitter in particular, can be used as a tool to build community within a Spanish as a second‐language literature classroom. The current action research project seeks to address this gap. Set in two rural higher‐education institutions in Iowa and Tennessee, the authors used Twitter as a platform to build an online educational community of language learners. At the conclusion of the semester's guided projects using Twitter, survey responses were gathered from participants in both classes. Twitter was found to not only encourage meaningful communication in the target language, but also to foster community among language learners outside of the classroom, thereby integrating the school and global communities standard of ACTFL's fifth “C,” one of the most elusive of the World‐Readiness Standards for Learning Languages. The Challenge Students and social media seem like a perfect pair, but can a platform like Twitter be an effective educational tool within the classroom? Can community building among language learners be achieved online, providing an alternative educational community?