Whatsapp and the speaking production

Abstract

Online learning has become the new reality in the educational field due to the covid19 pandemic hence education had to adapt to the technological resources and work together to find new ways of teaching. Mobile applications allow users to access and share information securely at anytime and anywhere. For these reasons, this project was aimed to analyze the impact of WhatsApp use to promote speaking production. This research project had a mixed approach and a pre-experimental design. The sample was 37 third-semester students of the Pedagogía de los Idiomas Nacionales y Extranjeros Program at Universidad Técnica de Ambato. At the beginning of the research, a pre-test based on the standardized test PET speaking section of Cambridge was applied in order to know the speaking level of students. Then students were exposed to the treatment, which consisted of developed speaking activities using the voice messages option offered by WhatsApp. These activities were carried out in six synchronous and two asynchronous sessions for three weeks through the Zoom platform. At the end of the treatment, a post-test was applied to find out if students improved their speaking skills after the intervention. The data obtained from the tests were analyzed using the T-test statistics in the SPSS software. Finally, the results showed that the use of WhatsApp within the English language learning process had a significant impact on the improvement of speaking production