Establishing a WhatsApp Conversation: One of Innovations in English Language Teaching

This paper discusses the use of WhatsApp as one of current beneficial devices to assist students in communicative language learning. Based on the writer’s experience in teaching English for Specific Purposes at Information Technology Department, WhatsApp can increase students’ motivation in learning and it offers huge opportunities for them to share and take ideas in the target language to improve their knowledge. It allows them to engage actively in online conversation and create confidence to use English in daily communication through two forms of conversation such as independent and dependent conversation. The first type assists students to interact among themselves to discuss various interesting topics, whereas teachers are not involved in their online dialogues. The latter, however, requires teachers to guide the whole processes, and they are actively participating in the online discussion. This media can help students build their confidence and motivation to learn. Based on the questionnaire distributed to the subjects, it revealed that they felt confident, independency, enthusiasm, and having positive attitude to learn English using the application. Hence, WhatsApp is one of recent technologies that can be used in language teaching especially to motivate non-English major students to learn English. Keywords: whatsapp, conversation, English language teaching