Selection of the Corpus

Regarding selection methodology, 100 tweets were manually gathered by taking screenshots from a computer. As my interest was to focus on two specific Twitter accounts in a certain period, I manually selected 50 tweets per account following numerical and chronological criteria. The compilation of tweets started on February 16th, 2022, and the tweets were collected, going backwards in time until the set number was reached. The combination of chronological and numerical criteria catered for the significant difference in publication frequency between both accounts: While the timespan of WWF’s selected tweets goes from January 1st to February 16th, Greenpeace’s only covers from February 11th to February 16th. All tweets were extracted from the section “Tweets and replies,” excluding retweets to focus on Twitter content specifically produced by the accounts.

Fostering Students’ Integral Development

The generic analysis of the corpus (^{Sancho-Ortiz, 2022}) resulted in this paper by opening up the possibility of exploring the potential applications of science dissemination tweets in EFL teaching and learning. One of the critical aspects identified in that generic analysis is the constant address of environmental and social issues. This somehow relates to a growing interest in the European context in renovating environmental policies and the resulting effort in the educational community to make students aware of the importance of their role in the environmental crisis (^{Bayrhuber & Mayer, 2000}). The promotion of students’ awareness as regards globally relevant issues can also be linked with another policy change experienced in the educational field: the formulation of the key competencies recognised by the European Council in May 2018 and the 21st-century skills established in the KSAVE (Knowledge, Skills, Attitudes, Values, and Ethics) model (^{Binkley et al., 2012}). The key competencies and students’ awareness of global responsibility are fundamental to their development as competent human beings. Under this premise, and considering the topics addressed in the tweets gathered, the first insight in this paper shows that EFL teachers can take the corpus as a productive source of material through which to promote students’ development of 21st-century skills and key competencies advocated for in new European educational policies-also considered as crucial educational requirements in the Aragonese curriculum within the Spanish framework.

Among the different competencies to foster, the most apparent connection in content comes with developing mathematical and scientific competence, as students may need to interpret scientific data and terminology from environmental issues. For such interpretation, students must uphold a critical analytical position, believed to be the essence of critical thinking, one of the skills included in the KSAVE model. See, for instance, Figure 1. Based on this image, students could be asked to reflect on the tweet’s statistical data (percentages) and hypothesise the reasons behind the amount of plastic reaching the ocean through rivers.

Figure 1 WWF’s Tweet about Plastic Pollution 

Apart from the mathematical competence, reflecting on the origin of a specific environmental problem-such as plastic pollution in Figure 1-could enhance students’ entrepreneurship competence, as they could be asked to devise solutions for such issues. This would require them to be creative and innovative, two skills of the KSAVE model that constitute entrepreneurship competence. Another connection is that to achieve their science dissemination purposes and promote active participation in their causes; the two accounts emphasise the sense of belonging to a global community, which establishes links with socio-civic competence and the sense of citizenship and social responsibility of the KSAVE model. Moreover, all these reflective tasks would become efficient means to both promote the linguistic communication competence-inherent in any English course-and introduce a communicative approach to English teaching, as students would be focusing on negotiating meaning rather than on merely learning grammatical aspects (^{Ellis & Shintani, 2014}). Similarly, using authentic data in a digital format (tweets) in a classroom context entails that students would work on their digital competence and the use of ICTs by learning to find, critically analyse, and process information through a digital platform such as Twitter-all of which is given considerable relevance within the KSAVE model (^{Binkley et al., 2012}).

In addition to connecting with key curricular competencies and 21st-century skills, science dissemination tweets may have further applications, such as addressing identity issues related to the social and personal development of the learner. The generic analysis of the corpus (^{Sancho-Ortiz, 2022}) demonstrates that, despite their scientific and, therefore, theoretically neutral nature, the WWF and Greenpeace accounts sacrifice scientific objectivity in their tweets to embody their corporative principles and raise environmental issues to public knowledge. In this way, they gain support and active participation from their audience. By pointing to these objectivity alterations in the classroom, teachers could make students face biased or intentionally charged texts so that they understand, first, that not everything they read online is necessarily true and, second, how the stance of the author determines the way readers perceive information, that is, understand the pragmatic dimension of the communicative competence (^{Canale & Swain, 1980}). Similarly, science dissemination tweets could promote students’ reflection on their use of social media, including creating an online identity and the reliability of information. This would entail designing teacher-guided activities considering the age limitation of the platform-above 13 years old-to gradually introduce students to the dynamics of online communication while highlighting the risks of consuming biased content, contacting malicious users, or posting personal content to an audience of millions. The issue of beyond-the-text meaning found in online discourse relates to this paper’s second insight: the potential of science dissemination tweets to teach written comprehension and production.

Teaching Written Comprehension and Production

The second insight derives from the connection between the processes undergone by EFL students and Twitter users when consuming and producing texts. Concerning text consumption, a similarity has been found regarding the pre-reading requirements faced by students and Twitter users and the resulting impact that these have in choosing specific reading skills to decode texts. In the same way that Twitter users have a clear purpose before they choose a tweet to read-seeking specific information, acquiring general knowledge, or being entertained (^{Zhang & Duke, 2008}) -EFL learners need a clearly stated purpose to succeed in reading tasks (^{Knutson, 1997}). Having been shown that “purpose affects the reader’s motivation, interest, and manner of reading” (^{Knutson, 1997}, p. 49), bringing Twitter into the classroom context could make students realise that the goal-oriented selecting process they go through as social media users is precisely the same procedure they need to follow as L2 learners in their reading tasks. Another aspect in which Twitter users and L2 students coincide is their need to identify the author’s stance to avoid biased content-in the case of Twitter users-and successfully understand a text-as for L2 learners. In this context, science dissemination tweets could be handy tools to evidence the importance of an authorial stance. This results from the fact that taking advantage of the semiotic nature of Twitter (^{Zappavigna, 2017}), the WWF and Greenpeace accounts consciously exploit multimodality to engage the intended audience in their denouncing and informative messages and reach their disseminating purposes more easily (^{Sancho-Ortiz, 2022}). For example, Figures 2 and 3 could be shown to students to demonstrate that both the WWF and the Greenpeace accounts resort to the first-person plural (“our” or “we”) and emoticons (sad face and clapping hands) to stress the need for urgent global cooperation, and thus, make their audience feel directly involved in the issues addressed.

Figure 2 WWF’s Tweet on Deforestation 

Figure 3 Greenpeace’s Tweet About Ocean Protection 

Considering the similarities concerning written comprehension, it could be argued that bringing into the classroom those reading practices that EFL students typically carry out outside-such as consuming tweets-could teach them how to read more comprehensively and become competent internet users. This latter idea of educating competent users relates to the curricular requirement of fostering students’ digital competence by teaching them how to filter information in the digital net. This translates into making students aware, first, of their exploitation of digital affordances such as hashtags as information sources and, second, of the risks of not using these digital means critically, thus contributing to developing critical thinking skills.

Apart from the similarities regarding reading, a parallelism has been found in the steps followed by Twitter users and EFL learners to produce texts. Within the last decades, the context of EFL teaching has experienced significant changes as regards the conception of writing proficiency (^{Hasan & Akhand, 2010}). These changes primarily derive from a shift from evaluating writing as a product to conceiving it as a process (^{Brown & Lee, 2015}) subdivided into five phases-pre-writing, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing (^{McKensie & Tomkins, 1984})-which, to a certain extent, coincide with the steps official accounts in Twitter are expected to follow when posting a tweet. In this sense, both L2 students who are instructed in the process-writing approach and the users of official Twitter accounts have a pre-writing stage in which they plan the topic they will address in their writing and consider the resources available to do so. Similarly, Twitter could enhance the importance of the drafting, revising, and editing stages, as the platform allows users to save their messages as drafts and edit them as many times as needed before sharing them. Therefore, students could replicate these steps when composing a text in the L2 and posting a tweet. Such imitation practice would also prove the significance of publishing as a necessary stage by demonstrating to students that, in essence, every text is written to be published-either through a social networking site where it is shared with an audience of millions or in an English classroom, where the teachers and classmates become the audience.

Adding up to their potential to enhance the importance of conceiving writing as a process, science dissemination tweets could be used to provide students with guided opportunities for output production-one of the core principles of SLA (^{Ellis & Shintani, 2014}) and CLT (^{Brown & Lee, 2015}; ^{Lightbown, 2003}). In this context, the tweets could function as a model or WAGOLL (What a Good One Looks Like) for scaffolding to facilitate students’ task of crafting their tweets. By doing this, students would understand that regardless of the apparent informality of a text and as claimed in genre theory (^{Bhatia, 1993}), every text belongs to a specific genre and, as such, presents a series of generic features that define it. Moreover, by analysing and producing tweets, students would practice their multimodal competence and become aware of mode convergence’s implications when making meaning, an aspect of digital literacy essential for present-day communication (^{Kalantzis & Cope, 2015}).

Teaching Vocabulary and Grammar

The connection between the real-life content of the tweets and the topics addressed in an EFL classroom not only allows teachers to foster key competencies and 21st-century skills but also makes the tweets an enriching source of authentic L2 materials to teach vocabulary and grammar. Exposure to authentic L2 input constitutes one of the core principles of CLT and SLA, for it adds to the establishment of meaning and real-life communication aims as the basis of the learning process (^{Richards, 2006}). Knowing this, Twitter could be considered a specifically productive source of vocabulary items because its constantly updated content presents unlimited examples of useful vocabulary (^{Sancho-Ortiz, 2022}). In the case of science dissemination tweets, these texts’ scientific and specialised nature endows their vocabulary with a certain degree of complexity that might be difficult to handle at certain educational stages. However, as tweets primarily aim to disseminate knowledge, it is taken for granted that their authors will try to adapt the register and complexity of their explanations to the knowledge of their non-specialised audience, facilitating the decoding and inferring processes students undergo to understand the L2 message. Apart from this, the generic analysis of the corpus shows that most tweets are examples of multimodal ensembles that include images and emojis whose function is to rephrase textual meaning. Such a multimodal nature might also simplify the decoding process as learners could rely on the visual mode to understand the meaning of specific words. This is only plausible when vocabulary appears in a specific context, a highly recommendable strategy when teaching vocabulary (^{Brown & Lee, 2015}). For example, in Figure 4, the photo of a person in a location full of plastic waste is included to ensure the reader understands the meaning of the sentence “Turkey is not a plastic dump!”

Figure 4 Greenpeace’s Tweet About Plastic Dumpsites 

By relying on images to infer meaning, students would be working on their visual literacy while practising pre-reading strategies and complying with the requirements of CLT: They will be both focusing on meaning negotiation (^{Ellis & Shintani, 2014}) and avoiding literal translation, a learning practise generally used in traditional methodologies which at times is believed to hinder students’ reasoning process (^{Ellis & Shintani, 2014}). In the same way that seeing lexical items in an authentic context of use can facilitate learning for L2 students, exposure to various actual grammar forms can allow them to understand the abstract theoretical notions explained in the classroom regarding the function and formation of verbal tenses. In the case of the scientific dissemination tweets, the generic analysis demonstrated a predominance of verbs in the indicative mood, mainly present and past tense. Thus, this type of tweet could explain the differences between and functions of such verbal forms. Thereby, students could be asked to reason why these scientific texts use present tenses and the implications this has as regards objectivity. This reasoning process would relate to the development of scientific competence.

Teaching Multimodal Awareness: A Means to Practice Integrated Skills

The presentation of grammar and vocabulary in context is not the only issue related to analysing English teaching and learning materials. Indeed, many studies (^{Hanifa, 2018}; ^{Rodrigues, 2015}) have examined the role of textbooks in teaching and learning dynamics and the possible risks of using them ineffectively. In this sense, the last insight in the present paper shows the resemblance between the design of textbooks as inherently multimodal teaching tools and science dissemination tweets as texts with conscious exploitation of multimodality to make meaning (^{Sancho-Ortiz, 2022}). In the last decades, there has been an increase in the use of visual images in English textbooks (^{Kress & van Leeuwen, 2021}) and a change in the conception of written pages as visual rather than verbal units (^{Bezemer & Kress, 2010}), which have allowed for the potential of textbooks’ multimodal nature to be considered within the teaching context (^{Mushtaq et al., 2022}). Despite this preference for multimodal designs and the belief of some that textbooks are fundamental elements in language teaching (e.g., ^{Cunningsworth, 1995}), textbooks might be perceived as inefficient material sources that fail to consider the complexity of language learning and the heterogeneity of students’ individual needs (^{Allwright, 1981}). Hence, introducing innovative materials extracted from multimodal digital platforms and designing tasks oriented to enhance students’ multimodal awareness and literacies (^{Kalantzis & Cope, 2015}) seem to be effective solutions to the inconveniences of textbooks. This would entail taking students’ self-taught ICT competencies, which derive from their knowledge of social media and networking sites, as the initial step to developing linguistic competence.

Concerning the functionality of the science dissemination tweets to teach multimodal awareness, the corpus analysis (^{Sancho-Ortiz, 2022}) proves that the WWF and Greenpeace accounts conveniently use mode convergence to reach their disseminating purposes. Accordingly, to practice multimodal awareness, students could be required to identify the reason why each tweet introduces specific visual elements (e.g., emojis), specialised scientific terms (e.g., “plastic pollution”), or a precise organisation of content in different paragraphs. Asking students to analyse aspects such as the choice of vocabulary (verbal mode), images (visual mode), or a specific layout (spatial mode) would allow them to reflect on the purpose behind mode convergence and become aware of the importance of identifying multimodal patterns when consuming online content.

When approached from the perspective of multiliteracies, the examples of multimodality found in science dissemination tweets can also serve to practise integrated skills in the EFL classroom. Understanding that learners make and process meaning in different modes, languages, and discourses (^{Kalantzis & Cope, 2015}) entails that they should be confronted with a wider variety of communication forms than those offered in traditional textbooks. This will allow lessons to comply more easily with the CLT tenet of integrated skills since, through digital multimodal texts, students would be exposed to varied meaning-making modes. For example, the previous generic analysis of the corpus shows that many tweets contain images or emojis that reinforce the verbal message and, thus, can be used to teach vocabulary. These same visual elements can also promote discussion activities about the design of such images or the topics addressed, fostering both speaking and the development of students’ visual literacy.

Similarly, given the interactive nature of the platform, students could simultaneously practice reading and writing by being asked to craft their responses to the tweets as if they were Twitter users. For such writing, they would have to consider the platform’s affordances (e.g., character constraint or the use of hashtags), so they would work on their digital competence while exploring generic conventions. Figure 5 is an example of a tweet that may be used for a reading-writing activity: Students would have to first read the tweet’s content and the video and then write their own tweet about their city, arguing whether it is plastic smart or not.

Figure 5 WWF’s Tweet on Plastic Smart Cities 

In the case of Figure 5, the video included has no sound and, therefore, could not be specifically used to practice listening skills. However, many other tweets containing videos with music and oral explanations could become the object of listening activities. Students could be asked to watch the video and orally comment on it to practise listening and speaking or to answer a series of written questions about the clip to practice writing. Apart from this, as multimodal ensembles themselves, some videos also contain examples of the gestural mode, which express significant paralinguistic meanings that students need to be aware of according to curricular demands. Similarly, these videos make very innovative use of spacing and visual elements such as colours, as in Figure 5, in which WWF probably avoids placing the message in the middle of the image to give prominence to the picture of the earth. In the case of this tweet, to work on their visual and digital literacies, students would have to reflect on the choice of yellow as the colour for input enhancement, the realism of the earth image, and the way light and shade are used to direct the viewer’s attention to the verbal and visual elements.

Not only is the multimodal format of science dissemination tweets advantageous for students in their practice of integrated skills but also for teachers in their need to adapt to students’ individual needs. In this sense, there exists a parallel between the way science dissemination Twitter accounts (@WWF and @Greenpeace) use mode convergence to reach a heterogenous audience as broad as possible and the way teachers resort to varied materials containing different semiotic modes to respond to their students’ learning styles and needs. Although, as has been previously said, textbooks do rely on mode convergence to facilitate learning, one single tweet can contain the same information expressed-and sometimes extended-in (multimodal) ways that students are more accustomed to consuming. This can be seen in Figure 5, where the information in the hashtag #StopPlasticPollution is rephrased through the stop sign and water glass emoji. Tweets seem likely to provide teachers with diverse ideas to address specific topics according to major learning styles. These include designing tasks based on producing tweets for kinaesthetic learners, listening activities with videos for auditory learners, and analysing visual elements for visual learners.

The visual layout of tweets can also serve to design activities for students with specific educational needs (SEN). For instance, the paraphrasing function of emoji (Figure 5) might allow students with autism spectrum disorder to learn the meaning of certain words more easily, given their enhanced visual processing abilities (^{Alnemr, 2022}). Similarly, by presenting input in different formats (e.g., visually synthesising images as the plastic dump in Figure 4) and using short-length tweets, students with language-related disabilities, such as developmental language disorder and dyslexia, would better understand complex abstract notions (e.g., plastic pollution). The multimodal dynamism characterising tweets can thus be a productive means to enhance students’ multimodal awareness and visual literacy, facilitate integrated skills practice, and adapt materials to students’ needs.

Overall, science dissemination tweets seem to be highly productive in EFL teaching and learning as they provide students with authentic and updated materials to enhance their communicative competence. Not only does the content and digital format of the tweets allow for students’ personal development-which includes the acquisition of key competencies and 21st-century skills-but it also facilitates the understanding of formal linguistic aspects (vocabulary and grammar) and the practice of communicative skills (either relying on multimodal elements or focusing on individual skills such as reading or writing).