This dissertation deals with the developing and development of EFL learners' communicative competence in writing in a blended learning course. The dissertation addresses issues related to the conceptualization of developing communicative competence and measuring learners' progress as well as using ICT in foreign language teaching. The underlying research question was whether learners' communicative competence changed after using a series of online discussion tasks, and if so, in what manner. The empirical research was conducted as a case study in which 18 learners in an EFL course at the CEFR A2 level participated in three discussion tasks conducted online, using asynchronous discussion forum. The discussions were built on social constructivist learning theories. Methods of data collection and analysis included pre- and post-tests, learner corpus compiled from the texts written by the students in two online discussions and its analysis, and a questionnaire survey. The results showed that learners' overall level of communicative competence in writing improved. Specifically, the syntactic complexity of learners' language produced at the beginning and at the end of the course increased and learners' perceived fluency in writing improved. These findings support the claim that learners' active participation in...
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:nusl.cz/oai:invenio.nusl.cz:309804 |
| Date | January 2012 |
| Creators | Tůma, František |
| Contributors | Píšová, Michaela, Betáková, Lucie, Dontcheva Navratilova, Olga |
| Source Sets | Czech ETDs |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/restrictedAccess |
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