FACEBOOK AT THE TIME OF "DIGITAL NATIVES": TEACHING SPANISH THROUGH SOCIAL NETWORKS

Language acquisition is a process which is influenced by cognitive, attitudinal, demographic, linguistic and experiential factors. At the time of globalization, structural change occurred with the advent of the technological revolution, the subsequent introduction of innovative tools in teaching, have transformed the concept of learning. At the web's century youngers, "digital natives", are creating a kind of "parallel school" not only to access to knowledge, to collaborate with users and discuss, but also to teach and learn languages through social networks, blogs, fora and communities, as if they were in a virtual classroom. As to the acquisition of Spanish as a L2, analysing the most recent web platforms dedicated to teaching and learning of Spanish online (Palabea, Livemocha, Youtube, ConversationExchange.com, Mango, Skype), we focused on the most famous social network of our time: Facebook, to underline that the teaching and learning process of foreign languages, in our case Spanish, has become a "social activity" based on support and mutual cooperation. The aim of this paper is to investigate those Facebook’s pages that are designed to teach and learn Spanish; among them the largest and most active community of Italian students of Spanish has allowed us to deepen our investigation through the publication of an online test giving us the opportunity to have a clearer picture about the users, their relationship with the fan page and their level of language.