ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought drastic changes in the teaching and learning of EFL, not least through the increased use of ICT and web 3.0 technologies. As part of this phenomenon, blogs have become a widely used technique for assisting foreign language acquisition. The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that the use of blogs has a significant impact on the development of reading skills in English learners. The study was based on 106 participants (57 male and 49 female) from a private secondary school in the central highland region of Ecuador, with an age-range from 12 to 19 years. A nonparametric-experimental design was applied to the whole sample, who were pre-tested, given reading development instruction, and then post-tested. The pre-test and post-test were adapted from the Cambridge Preliminary English Test (PET) and consisted of 5 multiple choice comprehension questions, 5 scanning questions and 6 fill in the gap questions. In the instructional phase, the participants engaged in 6 sessions of asynchronous and 6 sessions of synchronous study, in which a variety of digital resources such as Kahoot, Nearpod, Educaplay, Liveworksheets, Padlet, Quizzis, British Council, Quizzlet and others, were employed to contribute to students' communicative competence. Data tendencies and normality were measured through the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, which was 0.000;while Wilcoxon was used to corroborate the hypothesis. The results showed a significant improvement of 66.9% in the students' reading skills through the use of web 3.0 blogs. Findings of the research show that the integration of web 3.0 technologies, specifically blogs foster learners' oral and written interaction, being reading the keystone of the whole process. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
This research project tries to investigate the influence of the Moth stories in the development of the speaking English skill. This is an experimental representation of the learning in form of storytelling method. This study had the participation of 39 students from the second semester “A” of Pedagogía de los Idiomas Nacionales y Extranjeros program at Technical University of Ambato. The whole experimental group (EG) was allowed to use online resources such as stories taken from The Moth web page to practice and complete some speaking tasks. To assess the speaking skill, a mock-up Key English Test (KET) speaking part was used as a pre and post-test. The speaking criteria were stated in the rubric provided by Cambridge which consisted of Grammar and Vocabulary, Pronunciation and Interactive Communication. The experiment was designed with the use of with the use of online stories according to student’s age and needs and obviously taking into consideration the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to analyze the experimental data that were represented in the paper, the SPSS program was used to apply a T-Student test. To conclude, the results showed that online stories taken from The Moth web page had positive effects on the development of the students’ speaking skill. Its interface, resource, structure, and methodology were engaging for students so they improved mainly the pronunciation and its branches which are the intelligibility, word-stress, intonation and phonological features. Thus, the positive effects of using online storytelling strategies were obvious in this research. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.