Dear pen or dear blog?: Pen-and-paper and blog modalities in journal writing in Spanish as a second language (¿Querido lápiz o querido blog?: Diferentes modalidades de escritura de diarios personales en segunda lengua)

LAURA MARINA COLOMBO

Baltimore

Conferencia; 29th Annual Graduate Research Conference (29 Conferencia Anual de estudiantes de posgrado); 2007

Graduate Student Association University of Maryland Baltimore County

 The aim of this work is to contribute with more specific insights about the use of weblogs in the classroom and specifically in the Spanish as a FL classroom in order to discover if journal writing can be enhanced by the use of blogs. The research question of this future study is whether students will produce more written output when writing journals using the weblog modality or not. The hypothesis of this experiment is that the modality of weblogs for journal writing tends to increase the length of students? entries compared to the traditional pen-and-paper modality. The dependent variable is the length of entries produced by the students and it is defined by the number of words that students wrote. The independent variable is the modality of journal writing used by the students: traditional pen-and-paper or weblogs. When using traditional pen-and-paper writing, students will use composition notebooks that will be photocopied at the end of each week. On the other hand, when using the weblog modality, students will create and maintain a private weblog, which the researcher will access at the end of each week. A convenience sample will be used for this study. The sample will be composed of students in a third semester Spanish class at a mid-size public university on the East Coast. In this university, most of the students take Spanish classes to complete their GFR (General Foundation Requirements), and Spanish is the most commonly taught second language at the university. This leads to a great heterogeneity in the student body in regards to gender, age, and declared major. To define if the sample is representative of the university population, the results of a demographic questionnaire will be contrasted with information about the general population of the university. The general purpose of this study is to contribute to the development of better technological teaching tools and techniques focused on fluency and real-life communication.