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Article published In: Applied Pragmatics
Vol. 7:2 (2025) ► pp.141–167

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L2 disagreement through social media

ORCiD logo with link | University of Hawai‘i at Manoa
ORCiD logo with link | University of Hawai‘i at Manoa
Published online: 4 November 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ap.24014.gon
Abstract
As frequent as disagreement is in everyday conversation, this speech act is rarely present in the foreign, second, or other language (L2) classrooms. Students almost never have an opportunity to disagree with their teacher, and disagreement with peers is framed as part of interactional activities without the interactional work needed in real life. Technology-mediated tasks can provide a space where students can practice this speech act in an authentic manner by engaging in interaction with other speakers of the language remotely. This exploratory classroom-based study investigates the production of disagreement in the language of beginner learners of Spanish in the U.S. through social media (Facebook). The results show that strong disagreement strategies were the most employed by all learners, regardless of treatment. A small change of the group engaged in Facebook toward target-like strategies suggests the potential of this task to expose students to this speech act, although the lack of enough rich interactive data prevents us from fully understanding the potential of the tool.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1Disagreement
    • 2.2Disagreement in English and Spanish
    • 2.3Facebook for L2 learning
  • 3.The study
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2The task
    • 3.3Design of the study
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Facebook data
    • 4.2Facebook group versus control group
    • 4.3Strong disagreement strategies
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Pedagogical implications
  • 7.Limitations and future research
  • Acknowledgments
  • References
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