Bringing Classroom and Outside World Together: Mobile Instant Messaging via WhatsApp© for Extracurricular Writing

Mobile phones have a rapidly growing language teaching and learning potential due to various technologies and applications including instant messaging. However, the related literature mostly documents studies aiming at investigating their role for teaching vocabulary, pronunciation, and content, and thus there are calls to focus on other skills, including writing. Responding to these calls to solve the problem of research scarcity on other skills, I opted for a qualitative research design to investigate the pedagogical potential of WhatsApp©, perceive my students’ experiences, and evaluate the process with all strengths and weaknesses. I attempted to make contributions to the existing knowledge on the role of WhatsApp© as one of the most commonly utilised mobile instant messaging applications for language teaching. At the end of a 4-month-period, I gathered my detailed qualitative data from 44 preparatory programme English majoring students at a large-size public university in the northeast of Turkey via a self-devised open-ended questionnaire and conducted a thematic content analysis. My findings highlighted the potential of WhatsApp© as an educational tool to enhance language skills and allow practice chance, offer entertainment and increase interest, decrease anxiety and increase motivation, encourage participation, offer a better communication between the teacher and the students, and help self-improvement. However, no classroom implementation is without limitations, and WhatsApp©-geared interaction was no exception as the implementation had some challenges such as student inconvenience, emotion-related issues, technical problems, content-related and language issues. Based on my dual role, that is, both an academician and practitioner (pracademic), I offered some pedagogical implications for those who want to utilise mobile phones to bring classroom and outside world together to enhance language teaching

Using What Students Have at Their Fingertips: Utilising Mobile Phones for Circular Writing

The integration of mobile phones into language teaching is at its infancy due to lack of uniform empirical support and limited studies focusing solely on vocabulary and pronunciation teaching. Arguing that writing should be merited further attention, we targeted a group of 26 English majoring students at a large-size public university in the northeast of Turkey to investigate their attitudes towards mobile phone-integrated language practice in the form of collaborative circular writing outside the school borders and collaborative whole class conferencing in the classroom with a seven-week case study. We gathered the qualitative data via an open-ended questionnaire, and a focus group interview showed that the participants enjoyed the activity as it enabled them to learn new words and structures, enhanced their writing by bringing them a sense of audience and showing them the importance of cohesion and coherence, and helped them know each other better despite the inherent technical problems such as limited storage capacity, credit problems, and group work requirements. It can be concluded that mobile phone can enrich traditional board, pen and pencil language instruction with its interactive nature and the chance to reach information anytime and anywhere if the teacher plans the process carefully and sheds light on the nature and objectives of this integration beforehand

Rethinking Portfolio-Based Assessment in Writing Courses

Compared to standard assessment, alternative assessment as a performance-based attempt to evaluate students’ performance has been regarded to have considerable relevance for English Language Teaching (ELT, hereafter), yet all scholars have not received it with equanimity due to its limitations regarding the need to design authentic tasks, time requirements, field-tested practices, to list but a few. These limitations necessitate more academic attempts to investigate the issue deeper, and of central relevance to this issue is the analysis of students’ perspectives as one of the most important education parties. Thus, the main rationale underlying the current study is to draw a holistic picture of portfolio-based writing assessment the current study was designed to investigate the perspectives of 50 prep class students enrolled in English Language and Literature Department of Karadeniz Technical University during spring semester in the 2016-2017 academic year with a mixed-method research design. A 19-item- questionnaire was followed by an in-depth individual interviews conducted with 5 participants. Results reveal that although most of the participants welcome alternative assessment in their writing classes, this application is not without blemish, as is detailed in through the text