Nowadays, English has become one of the most important languages in the world. Many
students enroll in English courses for learning the language; however, few of them succeed in
developing the language skills (listening, speaking, reading, and writing) which, according to
Raimes (1983) are interrelated and often reciprocal; thus, they cannot be separated because
they help to problems, share insights, and build the knowledge. However, the most difficult skills
for EFL learners is writing due to the fact that they find themselves unable to express their ideas
as accurately and convincingly in English as they would in their native language because they
are not yet sufficiently familiar with the rules, and standards of the English language; thus, many
of them have problems when writing.
The research aims at: First determining whether the influence of blogs and discussion boards
facilitates and motivates the improvement of the writing skills in the students enrolled in Reading
and Writing IV courses of English School at UTPL and second determining the effect of online
feedback in the process of improving writing skills. The topic of this research has been selected
in order to extend the existing knowledge pertaining to the influence of electronic
communication tools, particularly regarding the use of blogs and discussion boards as
supplementary material to improve writing skill. The tecniques used were reading, tabulating,
statistical calculation and survey.
The methodology used for language teaching has considerably improved during the last years
thanks to the development of technology; in this context, Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja
(UTPL) has an educational model oriented to the application of new technologies. For this
reason UTPL offers different electronic tools from wich the most important is EVA (Entorno
Virtual de Aprendizaje), an online space where teachers and students generate and share
knowledge.
Research on electronic tools to teach and develop writing skills has been carried out in
countries such England (Jelfs, 2007), USA (Hearn, 2007), (Joynes, 2000), Thailand (Zhao,
2009), Howe, and McKeachie (2001), Brazil (Sousa, 2009) among others, in which important
outcomes have been found, for example, in the research titled "Developing writing skills through
the use of blogs" a blog was used as an opportunity to teach writing skills in Portuguese. The
study showed a view on the potential of digital writing as a pedagogical tool for the development
of discursive skills, contributing to linguistic analysis practices in the classroom.
This research is beneficial because through it the investigator will awake Reading and Writing
teachers’ interest in using blogs, discussion boards as supplementary material in their class to
improve the writing skills, having as a result more motivating and interesting class as well as
improvement in the on-site system at UTPL.
The research demonstrates that blogs as supplementary material helped EFL students improve
their writing skills because had the opportunity of share knowledge with teacher and classmates
in contrast with discussion boards that no help to improve the writing skills because the
interaction and used of this tool was not frequently.