Interactive Forums and the Writing Skill

Abstract

Nowadays, forums are used to communicate around the world as a way to transmit information and interact with others about different opinions, perspectives, feelings, or solutions in a writing way. Some educators claim that interactive forums facilitate the way to write involving grammar structures and vocabulary as the formats to present a letter. The research problem addresses the deficiencies that students have when it comes to the performance of writing skills. For that reason, this research project sought to investigate the influence that has interactive forums in the development of writing skills. Furthermore, the study was a pre- experimental design with the participation of students from 2nd Bachelor of Science at “Adventista” High School, in Ambato. The study had a population of 20 students where the interventions were applied by zoom per three weeks. During this time, it was applied a pre-test and post-test taken from Cambridge Assessment English level B1 PET to assess the writing skill in part one and two using a standardized rubric with four subscales such as; content, communicative achievement, organization and language. All of them are over 20 points that in total are 40 points. The results were analyzed through the T-student statistical test using the SPSS software and were favorable as there was a great increase in the post-test results after the treatment. In conclusion, interactive forums allow students to improve their writing skills showing a great interest to learn English as a second language with the use of media tools such as online forums.