Abstract:

As social media becomes the ideal space of sharing information in a simple and convenient way, it continues to attract numerous scholarly studies. This paper investigates the peculiarity of social media in the academic life of international students in Turkey, with an aim of ascertaining the social media tools used by international students. Secondly is to scrutinize the academic purposes of social media usage among international students in Turkey. The third objective is to determine the academic benefits attained by international students in the usage of social media. This study was inclined in the Uses and Gratification theory, the researcher considered a randomly selected sample of international students in Istanbul City. Due to the nature of this study both qualitative and quantitative approaches were applied. Thus semi- structured interviews and questionnaires were used to get data on a randomly selected sample. Observantly, social media platforms found vital in the academic life of international students included; YouTube, Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter. In the same way, findings indicates that international students frequently use social media for more than twice a week to interact with their course mates as an encouragement for studying outside classroom. Remarkably, international students benefit from social media as they use You Tube to watch educational video clips on lectures delivered from other universities to widen on their understanding on a particular subject. Equally, Facebook and Whatsapp were purposely for instant messaging, sharing academic information about study topics with classmates and professors, arranging study groups and asking for help with studies. This paper correspondingly concludes that despite the potentiality of the social media in the academic sphere, it cannot go unnoticed that international students use it for other benefits especially for creating new friendship in and outside Turkey, sharing ideas and information plus communicating to their families and friends in their home countries about social and current affairs.

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