TikTok, Instagram and YouTube in Russian Language Teaching

Developing Intercultural Competence with Social Media

Abstract

In this contribution, we demonstrate how social media content can be used in school or university Russian language classes. Social media platforms provide a limitless variety of multimodal content continuously generated by users globally, including Russian L1 speakers. On the one hand, these posts represent the world of Russian-speaking individuals and reflect national cultural specifics; on the other, many learners use social media in their daily lives, which makes the content visually, linguistically, and pragmatically very familiar to them. This provides a solid foundation for integrating them into Russian language lessons to develop intercultural competence (Byram, 1997). Using three didacticized posts from TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, we exemplify how to successfully connect the content with textbook themes, how to consider different language proficiency levels, and how to develop various areas of intercultural competence.