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 aims to assess the impact that information and communication technologies have as support in tourism against the COVID-19 pandemic, in this way a study is developed within Digital Marketing in institutions of the tourism industry of the province of Tungurahua and how they have contributed to the dissemination of information in the field of tourism. This research was based on the implementation of a structured questionnaire of 45 Likert-scale questions, which measure the use of digital, technological and communication tools and strategies that tourism companies have used with the aim of improving their promotion with tourists based on a new normality that has been applied in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, the instrument designed and applied, obtained a level of trust of 0.831 by means of the Cronbach Alpha statistic taken from a sample of 320 institutions on the field of tourism. The statistic test for this research was Kolmogorov Smirnov, which allowed knowing the concordance between the data and the specific theoretical distribution, which was to check whether Digital Marketing is considered a supporting tool in tourism in the province of Tungurahua;with the final result obtained, the alternative hypothesis proposed in the research was accepted. The result of the project admitted to using auxiliary technological tools to boost current generations’ interest and knowledge of Digital Marketing through the distribution of information in the field of tourism. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
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.