Feature Article
Claudia Hassan Hariri Bahaa School and Lebanese International University, Lebanon
The Collaborative Media Project: Teaching Writing to Grade Nine Students in Lebanon
Although many educators theorize that interactive and collaborative technology tools are effective for providing students with motivating practice, research on collaborative and interactive technology is inconclusive. This article discusses and examines the effect of using blogs, an interactive and collaborative technology tool, on motivation and performance as well as on overall writing quality and revision patterns of ninth graders at a private Englishmedium school in Saida, Lebanon.
Rationale
This author felt dissatisfied with the results of the writing sessions in grade 9 classes. Students showed a lack of interest in applying all the steps of the writing process and consequently wrote essays with many grammatical and organizational mistakes. Motivation, which can be seen as the impetus to create as well as sustain goal-seeking acts, was missing. Research has stressed that students need the motivational will as well as the cognitive skill to do well at school (Pintrich & Schunk, 2002). Lately, there has been an increased enthusiasm for technology as an educational tool. Higher Education and the Workforce (2004) stresses that our students, the “Net Generation,” born in and after 1982, have pushed educators to embrace new teaching strategies to meet their needs. Furthermore, many researchers have investigated the interactive and communicative potential of technology in learning and emphasized the kind of interactivity that goes beyond computerhuman interaction to social interaction among a
Volume 24
11
No. 2
June 2016
group of learners in a learning community. The Internet can host such a learning community among students from different cultures and backgrounds and give them the opportunity to interact. This kind of interaction generates interest and motivation to learn and communicate. This communication with a real audience plays a key role in student motivation, which facilitates learning. Lim (2004) recommends strategies to engage learners in online learning environments. In fact, many writing teachers would argue that making students’ writing public is important because of the benefits of social interaction. Isaacs and Jackson (2001), for example, note Bruffee’s contribution to our understanding of the importance of public writing: In his work, Bruffee argues strenuously for students to go public with their writing to receive feedback, on the grounds that public writing in classrooms de-emphasizes teacher authority and promotes student-writers’ abilities to see themselves as responsible writers and to view writing as a social activity. (p. xii) Smith (2000) believes that students “take real-world writing more seriously when it is done on the web, where it might actually be seen and used” (p. 241). Many students nowadays send email messages to friends and family, converse via instant message daily and surf Internet websites. In fact, many educators throughout the world have started to make use of weblogs, seeking to find how powerful this interactive internet can be. Weblogs or blogs are
TESOL Arabia Perspectives
www.tesolarabia.org