Effect of Online Learning on Struggling ESL College Writers

This morning I found Effect of Online Learning on Struggling ESL College Writers, an interesting article by Dr. Reima Sado Al-Jarf, an English writing professor in Saudi Arabia. She has done a study on the effects of computer and internet usage on the writing abilities of her students with some interesting results. According to her research, when she added an online portion (using Blackboard) to her coarse, her students not only felt more motivated to write, but they wrote more often, and learned more from that writing then the class which only had in class instruction. I found it interesting that she specified that no mistakes were remarked on or "graded" in the online portion. Rather, the students were encouraged to start their own thread discussions, respond to others, and send each other e-mail, not only about classroom issues, but holidays and birthdays. Also, Dr. Al-Jarf encouraged them to use find information on Yahoo and other web sites.

Ultimately, she found that this technology, when used in addition to the usual classroom work helped the students scores and writing a great deal. (Please go to the article for more specifics on testing and classroom work.) I begin to wish that my Spanish classes had an internet aspect like this class, as I can see many reasons why I would have picked up vocabulary and rules much quicker...

This article seems to be one more piece of evidence that using the technology available (internet, Blackboard, computers) outside of the classroom can and does help student writers write more and better. I am forced to remind myself what Dr. Al-Jarf made a point of in her article. **This internet work was in addition to the normal classroom activities. Also, the instructor often got students to participate by invitations, e-mails, and comments on work already done. All of this could lead to more successful writers - and a larger workload for teachers.**

As usual, this paper can be found at http://dwc.hct.ac.ae/elearning/Research/SaudiResearchESL.pdf Please check it out for a lot of good information and more specifics on what I provided.