The importance of the social network sites and social media in raising the language learners' intercultural awareness

الملخص EN

In the nowadays globalised world and digital era, the explosive use of the Social Media and the Social Network Sites created a virtual world and context where users can exchange different information, share and spread various kinds of knowledge, more importantly, interact and communicate with many individuals from all over the globe.

This spread is caused by a variety of interests, practices and technological affordances that these SNSs offer.

Learners of languages as any other learners use these SNSs during their learning whether to help them in their studies, to improve their understanding or simply to gain more knowledge.

Intercultural awareness is an essential element that the learners must acquire and not ignore to keep that equilibrium between their native culture and the culture of the newly learnt language(s).

This paper investigates the usefulness of Social Media and SNSs in learning English as a foreign language and tries to highlight the extent to which it affects the students’ intercultural awareness.

For the empirical data needed for such a study, the investigation uses a questionnaire randomly administered to a sample of 200 learners of English as a foreign language at Batna-2 University.

Results show and ensure that learners used Social Media and Social Networks to develop effectively their intercultural awareness.