What would you recommend me? Learning the process of writing reviews

Abstract

According to Marquès (2013), we live in the society of the i-people where digital immigrants and digital natives coexist (Prensky, 2001). The digital revolution led to an increasing demand of technologically competent people to face ICT continuous and quick changes and challenges it produces (Sutton, 2013). In the field of education, a significant change needed to be carried out in order to adapt the current educational paradigm to the language of the “native digital speakers” (Prensky, 2001). As important as being technologically competent is acquiring the habit of autonomous learning. Dealing with the teaching of the writing skill, we will be successful promoting it only if we focus on the writing process and we provide the students with the necessary tools to achieve it. Otherwise, it will be a failure (Harmer, 2004). This Final Master Project, framed within the Educational Innovation modality, is based on the design and implementation of a blog as a complement material of a textbook in a first year of Higher Secondary Education. It was conducted during the academic course 2014-2015. The aim of this paper is twofold: (i) to give students the opportunity to improve their writing skills by practising the different stages of the writing process; and (ii) to encourage them to develop a habit of autonomous learning through the use of new technologies. The methodology followed consisted of a combination of the traditional approach and task-based language learning strategies besides the integration of ICT in the classroom. Throughout the implementation of this unit, the students wrote two reviews and fulfilled a series of tasks linked to different writing stages. The results of the comparison between the initial piece of writing and the last composition have been analysed in order to test the effectiveness of this pedagogical proposal. Results suggest that both the combination of the traditional and task-based approach and the use of new technologies help students to improve their writing skills. In addition, this methodology has encouraged them to develop a habit of autonomous learning.