Instagram as a Pedagogical Tool to Enhance Undergraduate Students’ Critical Thinking on Specialized Knowledge: A Qualitative Experiment

Social media have become part of students’ daily routines. Using social media for educational purposes can be attractive, given that it is becoming more and more difficult to engage new generations with traditional teaching techniques and methodologies. Following social semiotic studies of social media (Jones 2009; Adami 2014; Zappavigna 2013, 2016; Zhao / Zappavigna 2017), this paper describes a qualitative and empirical study aimed at exploring how university students can improve their critical thinking on specialized knowledge via social media. As Instagram is one of the most popular sharing devices in the word, in particular among young generations, a four-month experiment was conducted on 130 undergraduate students from the University of Naples “L’Orientale” (Italy). The study aims at verifying whether the use of Instagram in class can affect students’ learning process and improve their critical skills of specialized discourses and whether this platform can be exploited as a pedagogical tool to apply the theoretical concepts discussed in class. Academic implications of including Instagram in undergraduate English language curricula are explored, and entail suggestions for using social media to enhance skills in English and thematic development such as the language of advertising and tourism, apart from challenging learners creatively by using the theoretical frameworks studied in class.