The Impact of Adopting Facebook on Developing Descriptive and Narrative Paragraph Writing Skills of ESL Young Adult Learners

Facebook, as one of the popular social media sites worldwide and in Sri Lanka, has been highlighted as a powerful influencer on language learning. While Sri Lanka is working to modernize its paper-based traditional education system and follow global trends of incorporating technology and social media into teaching methods, Facebook use by students for learning reasons is a rarely explored area. The current study's problem stems from students' poor performance in English writing assessments and decreased interest in paper-based education. The objective of this study was to see how using Facebook assisted tertiary-level ESL students build descriptive and narrative paragraph writing skills. The study used an intervention research approach, with data obtained through pre and post-tests. The study included 60 intermediate-level ESL students from the University of Kelaniya who studied in the first-year "English for Social Sciences" course. Participants were chosen after the pre-test, and the experimental group's 30 students were taught for six weeks through a closed Facebook group, whereas the control group's 30 students were taught using paper-based method in regular classes. The similar lessons on descriptive and narrative paragraph writing were delivered to the students on the Facebook group and for the controlled group employing the conventional paper-based approach. The findings demonstrated statistically significant differences between scores of the controlled group and the experimental group, in favour of the experimental group subjected to Facebook learning, proving that Facebook is a modern arena that should be promoted as an appealing online platform to refine students' language skills.