Prospective English language teachers’ experiences in Facebook: Adoption, use and educational use in Turkish context

INTRODUCTIONSocial media is getting more and more popular because of the increasing number of Internet users through a two-way interaction. In relation to educational settings, not only does social media alter traditional modes of teaching/learning but also it contributes to the effectiveness of the learning process. More specifically, social media offers the following: new opportunities for learners to take control of their own learning and to access their own customized information, resources, tools and services, more collaborative ways of working, community creation, dialogue and sharing knowledge, a setting for learner achievements to attract an authentic audience (Richardson, 2008). In this regard, it is essential for teachers to improve their own teaching competencies by employing new technologies and encouraging their students to employ these new technologies more actively and independently outside the classroom (D'Souza, 2006). It is a sine qua non mainly because their students are highly likely to step into the classroom with increasingly more developed web literacy than their teachers.As far as social networking is concerned, Abbitt (2007, p. 1) states that "there has been tremendous growth in the popularity of websites focusing on social activities and collaboration". Since SixDegrees was introduced in 1997 as the first example of social networking sites, the sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Cyworld, and Bebo have attracted the attention of millions of users, many of whom have integrated these sites into their daily practices (Boyd & Ellison, 2007). From 1997 to 2001, there were several attempts. To exemplify, AsianAvenue, BlackPlanet, MiGente, LiveJournal, and Cyworld allowed users to create personal, professional, and dating profiles so that users could identify friends on their personal profiles. Four of the largest non-professional sites that dominate social networking in the English-speaking world now are MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, and Orkut.A great many research studies have been done to scrutinize social networking by specifically looking at variables such as purposes of Facebook usage (Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe, 2007), Facebook usage profile (Dba & Karl, 2008), time spent on Facebook (Pempek, Yevdokiya, & Calvert, 2009), effects of Facebook use on college adjustment (DeAndrea, Ellison, LaRose, Steinfield, & Fiore, 2011), effects of Facebook use on sociability and social capital (Keenan & Shiri, 2009), effects of Facebook use on learning performance (Sanchez-Franco, Villarejo-Ramos, & Martin-Velicia, 2011), educational usage of Facebook (Roblyer, McDaniel, Webb, Herman, & Witty, 2010; Albayrak, 2012), the impact of social networking on second language writing (Chen, 2012; Dixon, 2012), effect of online social networking on student academic performance (Paul, Baker, & Cochran, 2012), PELTs' perceptions of the use of Facebook (Atmaca, 2013), college students' views on Facebook (Anderson, 2014), and foreign language learners' interactions with their teachers on Facebook (Omar, Embi, & Yunus, 2012; Aydin, 2014). As is easily observed in the brief history of social network sites given above, they have had a huge impact on the way people live, which leads educators to make use of social networking in their own contexts and researchers to do various studies. In this regard, the study set out to investigate whether Prospective English Language Teachers' (PELTs) cebook adoption processes had an impact on their educational use of Facebook and whether PELTs' purposes of Facebook use had an impact on the educational use of Facebook.SOCIAL NETWORKING: DEFINITIONS, BENEFITS AND CHALLENGESIt was Boyd (2003), who first described social networking as "software applications that support the development of social connections between individuals and groups within a community". Very similarly, Barlett-Brag (2006, p. 3) viewed social networking as "the range of applications that augments group interactions and shared spaces for collaboration, social connections, and aggregates information exchanges in a web-based environment". …