Effect of Pre-Writing Activities through Online Forums on Writing Tasks

Authenticity in ELT: Selected Papers from the 42nd FAAPI Conference

APIM FAAPI

Lugar: Posadas; Año: 2017; p. 54 - 63

Authenticity and meaningful pedagogical practices acquire new dimensions in a world where digital technologies have become an integral part of everyday life and have introduced new elements to social interaction (Dussel & Quevedo, 2010). Their use has permeated the fields of science, politics, culture, entertainment, education, knowledge production and delivery, to name just a few. In this scenario, meaningful EFL teaching practices can neither ignore the application of information and communication technologies (ICT) nor fail to incorporate issues related to online learning in their research agendas. However, there is still little systematic evidence of the potential gains of the wide variety of issues related to web-based language learning (WBLL) in higher education worldwide (Ngo, 2016; Tri & Nguyen, 2014). Given the need to focus on meaningful uses of ICT and their impact on the development of language learning skills, the purpose of this paper is to analyse the effect of pre-writing activities through online forum debates on subsequent writing tasks carried out in the virtual classroom of an English Language II university course. This will help us to determine whether the collaborative construction of knowledge evidenced in students´ contributions to the forum during the first stage of this project is also reflected in their productions (Dalla Costa & Gava, 2016). The specific objectives are: a) to analyse the effects of the online pre-writing activities through the collaborative forum debates on the students´ writing tasks, and b) to present the results of a survey carried out to obtain the students´ perceptions of the online activity. To this end, we briefly review prior research on ICT and language teaching, focusing on the usefulness of digital technologies for the development of the writing skill in EFL learning. We develop a pedagogical approach to collaborative learning and communicative language teaching, and a conceptual framework based on Bloom´s (1971) taxonomy of levels of cognitive skills for the construction of knowledge. We also describe the methodology used for the analysis of students´ written productions. Finally, we present the results and limitations of this study, its pedagogical applications and future lines of research.