Twitter is being used in classes to help students learn Arabic

Twitter can sometimes feel like a language of its own, but one lecturer is using the social media site as a tool to teach Arabic. In Mahammed Bouabdallah's classes at the University of Westminster, London, students are set simple tasks using Twitter to complement their lessons. Bouabdallah publishes a photo or link and asks students to comment on it in Arabic, or runs a Twitter poll about events happening in Arabic-speaking countries and discusses the results in class. Sometimes, they will use Twitter's built-in translation tool and judge its accuracy. "They have to tweet outside the class, and we discuss it inside the class," says Bouabdallah. His own research suggests that Twitter is popular as a language learning tool, with 80 per cent of surveyed students responding positively to its use.