THE PERCEPTION OF FINAL-YEAR STUDENTS ON THE USE OF INSTAGRAM FOR LEARNING ENGLISH

Social media gives important things to the users for communicating and sharing information with others. Instagram as social media becomes the popular one used to share photos, videos, and send messages. With the popularity of Instagram, it can be used as a medium that has the potential to help English language skills. This study has two objectives, first is to investigate the advantages of students using Instagram as a medium for learning English. The second is to investigate students’ activities in using Instagram to learn English. Using descriptive qualitative as the research design, this study collected data from six participants from a private university in Yogyakarta. The technique for data collection is the interview. The findings reveal that Instagram has six advantages to learning English is getting new vocabulary, grammatical mastery, helping listening skills, helping reading skills, helping speaking skills, and students motivation to write. In addition, activities using Instagram can help students learning English is reading English captions, writing English captions, watching English lessons on Instagram, discussing through the comments column on English posts, and making English videos on Instastory.
Keywords: Instagram, English language skills, social media, learning media