Edinburgh Napier University

  It is a truism to say that in order to motivate language learners, we need to know what they find interesting and then design lessons that capture or reflect those interests. And yet, there are some things that are so obvious that we fail to notice them—such as the ubiquitous ‘selfie.’ This study reports the findings of a pilot study that used the concept of the ‘selfie’ to motivate students of an English as a second language class at a Thai university. Selfie has been so popular in Thailand that the Thai Tourism Authority has launched a Selfie Contest to promote local tourism. The world’s selfie queen who is supposed to have published more than 12,000 photos of herself on social media is from Thailand.
For this study, 25 2nd year university students who participated in the investigation were asked to take ‘still selfies’ and ‘video selfies’ which were then used as the key teaching materials to learn adjectives, idiomatic expressions and other relevant vocabularies. The video selfies were used by the students in a reflexive manner to critically examine their own pronunciation and interaction strategies. The findings of this limited study indicate that the students found the selfie project to be a valuable (not to mention enjoyable) experience which helped them in their learning of the target language.