Abstract
This article examines how the Internet can be used to ease the process of writing by suggesting resources for the planning, writing and revising stages and how they can be used to carry out a writing task. One such resource is the Blackboard platform, which serves as a discussion tool and for teacher-to-student and student-to-student feedback. Based on sound L2 writing theories and ICTs, a pedagogical proposal for a writing task is proposed and explained that involves invention and organizing techniques; peer and teacher evaluation using the Blackboard platform; activities to practice argumentative skills, the five-paragraph essay and paragraph structure and evaluation sheets with criteria for correction on the Blackboard platform. This writing task can be of help to students and teachers alike: to students, in the task of writing an effective essay, and to teachers, in their role as lesson designers, information providers and classroom managers.
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Notes
- 1.
This page offers guidelines for traveling around different countries. To access this article on Spaniards, on the Home page, click on ‘Spain’, then ‘Culture’ and then in the first section, called ‘Spain Guide—Culture’, select the first article, entitled ‘The Spaniard: Everything you need to know for dealing with the locals’. As a text dealing with stereotypes for citizens of a given country, this is likely to work well for the activity proposed, since stereotyping is based on generalizations that cannot always be supported by evidence.
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Acknowledgments
We must acknowledge the work done by Professor Dr. Carmen Flys from the University of Alcalá as the main designer of the course Inglés Académico, since some of the teaching proposals are inspired by her duties in her classes: the type of task (i.e., writing an essay), the list of essay topics, the use of the Blackboard platform, the evaluation criteria and the aims pursued in this subject are mainly due to her inspiration. We also want to thank the students who gave their permission to reproduce their work here. Last but not least, we are very grateful to Sandra Stroo, writing instructor at IELI at University of North Texas, for her insightful comments and for proofreading the paper. The present study has been developed under the National Project EMOción y Lenguaje en acción: La FUNción Discursiva Emotiva/evaluativa en distintos Textos y contextos dentro del mundo del Trabajo: Proyecto Persuasión (FFI2013-47792-C2-2-P), reference to which is hereby acknowledged.
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Díez-Prados, M., Cabrejas-Peñuelas, A.B. (2018). The Internet as a Pedagogical Tool in the Writing Process: A Research-Based Approach. In: Muñoz-Luna, R., Taillefer, L. (eds) Integrating Information and Communication Technologies in English for Specific Purposes. English Language Education, vol 10. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68926-5_5
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