Supporting Online Language Teaching: The Use of Zoom and Facebook (Zoom-booking)

Integrating social media into classroom language teaching has been argued to be beneficial for both students and teachers. However, little is known about using two social media platforms in one online language class session, especially to support the teaching and learning process during the COVID19 transition to online teaching. This case study explores the use of Zoom and Facebook (henceforth referred to as Zoom-booking) as English language teaching support platforms during the COVID19 online teaching of a general English course by one English as a foreign language teacher (EFL) at a university in Thailand. We adopted the concept of teaching presence and netnography as a perspective. Findings from the online classroom observation, online traces (written text or posts, videos, PowerPoint slides, and images), and interviews revealed that our teacher-participant perceived Zoom-booking the online language classroom as personal and institutional. This suggests that while Zoom-booking supports teaching presence for synchronous and asynchronous teaching modalities, it also highlights the need for teachers to respond to their language learners’ needs. We discuss the implications, and we offer recommendations for future studies.