Effect of Using Facebook as a Teaching Tool on 7th Grade ESL Students Motivation - Essay Example

?Contents 2 Introduction 3 Rational and Context 4 Literature Review 4 Motivation 4.2. Motivation to Read and Write 4.3. Motivation to Learn English among Hong Kong Students 4.4. Reading and Writing with Technology 4.5. Facebook as a Teaching Tool 5 Research Questions 6 Methodology 6.1 Research Site 6.2 Participent 6.3 Data Collection, Intervention and Reflection 6.4 Data Analysis 6.5 Validity Issues 6.6 Ethical Issues 7 Research limitations 8 Work Cited 9 Appendix I : Students’ Satisfaction Survey 1. Title: Effect of Using Facebook as a Teaching Tool on 7th Grade ESL Students’ Motivation 2. Introduction: My ESL students of grade 7 has little motivation and participation in English language activities. Students’ motivation to learn language has always been a concern for researchers and educators. There have been several theories on what helps students achieve in ESL class. One of the main ideas for student motivation and involvement is the use of interactive technology. Smith (1997) has established that use of technology has positive effects on reading and writing . Further, Mayher (1990) and Littlewood (2001) has also expressed that students must be provided a sense of purpose and a sense of participation in learning. On the other hand, Childs (2009) has discussed the benefits that Facebook can yields in language learning owing to its ease and interactive features. Thus, I plan to use Facebook as a teaching tool to increase motivation and participation of my 7th grade students. The purpose of this Action Research study is to examine the effects of using Facebook as a teaching tool on the motivation level of my English class.This study will help me in developing clear understanding of such a strategy which may help my students to better participate in English reading and writing tasks. 3. Rational and Context: Here in Hong Kong, I have noticed that students of my ESL class have little interest in learning English. They are non-native speakers of English and are not interested in reading English books. Their participation in writing tasks has also been nominal. The students are required to read 4 English story books in a year. After reading each book, they have to write a book report. What I find from their book reports are summaries copied from the Internet. All these are clear signs of little motivation to read and write English. On the other hand, (Littlewood, 2001) have stated that traditional teaching techniques cannot motivate Hong Kong ESL students to have higher participation and motivation in reading and writing English. Further, several studies indicate that despite a variety of teaching techniques including audio-visual have been used in Hong Kong to Teach English as a second language, predominant teaching method is lecture( (Melanie & Warhurt, 2000). Roman-Perez (2003) have described that incorporation of interactive technology reflrcted positive impact over the motivation level of the students for reading English. And I know that all of my students are using Facebook to be in contact with each other. Further, in current Web 2.0 scenario, Facebook has top ranking in SNSs (Kazeniac, 2009). Thus I assume that using Facebook as a teaching tool in a creative way can increase motivation and participation level of my ESL students. 4. Literature Review: In order to implement my this idea of using Facebook as a teaching tool, I embark on reviewing relevant literature from five dimensions including motivation to learn, motivation to read and write, motivation to learn English among Hong Kong students, technology and motivation to read and write, and finally ,using Facebook as a teaching tool. 4.1. Motivation: Motivation is considered as a prompt and energizer in all fields of life (Mangal, 2002). It may be defined as the force that accounts for the stimulation, selection, direction, and continuation of certain behavior. Literatures on human psychology and on education have extensively discussed human motivation and student motivation in details. Similarly, majority of the educationists has the opinion that motivation affects what and how much people learn (Ormrod, 1998).Thus student motivation refers to the student's willingness, need, desire and urge to successfully participate in, the learning process" (Bomia et al., 1997). Many researchers have shown that high students’ motivation and engagement in learning have consistently been linked to reduced dropout rates and increased levels of student success ( Kushman, 2000).therefore, motivation to read and write is essential to learn English. 4.2. Motivation to Read and Write Research explains the need for the meaningfulness of the second language learning for the students. Traditional method of language teaching does not provide such opportunity. For instance, Hinchey (2001) says that traditional methodology of language teaching does not give due importance to the personal experiences of the learner. Thus, teachers will have to adopt such teaching techniques that provide the students opportunity to make language learning use of personal knowledge and experience. This utilization of personal knowledge and experience motivates the students to develop personal connections to the material being taught. Thus, it provides individual reasons to learn the language (Mayher, 1990). 4.3. Motivation to Learn English among Hong Kong Students Many other studies regarding student motivation to read and write English yield the same results. In a study it was found that most students do not like the traditional authoritarian classroom where teacher is supposed to transfer the knowledge to the students. (Littlewood, 2001). Another study explores that in Hong Kong where “listening to teacher” has been the most frequent classroom experience of students, many students have low confidence in their ability to speak English without prior planning. They feel reluctant when speaking it. This discomfort is increase with some teachers' error treatment t techniques (Liu & Littlewood, 1997) This problem of low-confidence and low motivation can be removed by the changes in teachers’ attitude and teaching techniques. For instance, a study revealed that in the two classes where the students expressed the most positive attitude towards process writing, the teacher had an adoption of the process approach in a fuller sense. This study also demonstrates that only by changing teaching techniques, student can be motivated to write English. (Pennington, Brock, & Yue, 1996) Littlewood (2001) has also expressed that students want active participation in exploring knowledge and reflect positive attitudes towards working in groups, with a sense of purpose. 4.4. Reading and Writing with Technology There are numerous studies that establish the positive effects of use of technology for reading and writing tasks. For instance Smith (1997) states this positive relationship between reading writing and technology: Reading is addictive to many people, computers are addictive to many people, and the combination of reading and computers prove irresistible, just as many people are already addicted to playing arcade games on book-sized electronic games machines or to musing esoterically among the entrails of computers themselves. (143-44) Another comprehensive study that incorporates web based technology to motivate students to read and write also presented encouraging results. Roman-Perez (2003), while describing the motivation level of the students, states that the students actually looked forward to reading a new online story every day. They enjoyed reading new stories via emails . Thus as a result, they started viewing reading as an enjoyable activity. Similarly, Freire (1998), says, “I've no doubt about the enormous potential for technology to motivate and challenge children and adolescents of the less-favored social classes.” (82) Literature review up till now has revealed me two major points of learning to motivate my ESL students to read and write. First, I need to make my ESL classroom fully interactive. Second, if I use interactive technology in an effective way, my students’ motivation level will be higher. Further, technology must provide an opportunity to share and display students’ work not only for teacher but also for their class fellows Strong, Silver and Robinson (1995) suggest that when students are provided opportunity to share their new learning with their class fellows, they have more energy and motivation to do the tasks. And Web 2.0 provides such opportunity. (Davis & Merchant, 2009) 4.5. Facebook as a teaching tool During past few years, Social network sites (SNSs) are now attracting the attention of academic and educators. A vital reason behind this attraction is their affordances, ease and reach (boyd & Ellison,2007).. It has been discussed in 3.4 that such a technology is required which is interactive and easy to use. Facebook provides discussion boards and students can share easily with their class fellows as well as their teachers.” In a sense, it extends the casual environment of the classroom online so students can talk and organize”. (Bedford & Golbeck, 2008) Childs (2009), who has used Facebook as a teaching tool describes the benefit it yielded. He noted that Facebook provides opportunity not merely to some artificial language exercises, but develop such a network which lets students communicate with me and with each other in a comfortable. Teachers can utilize Facebook in numerous creative ways. They can develop reading and writing projects for class. They can provide their studens an opportunity to enhance their communication. And above all they will be engaging students in a way that is beyond the reach of a traditional classroom setting (100 Ways You Should Be Using Facebook in Your Classroom, 2009). Bedford and Golbeck,( 2008) has give very practical and useful advices to utilize Facebook as a teaching tool. They suggest that beore employing any new technology in classroom, teacher must be at ease with the technology. Further,they must explore all the range of possibilities that a technology can present them. It will help them in mnagaing their tasks in a creative way. What I have learnet so far is that I can use Facebook as a teaching tool to motivate my ESL students to participoate in reading and writing tasks. This leads me to conduct a study that provides answers to the following questions 5. Research Questions Q1. How can I increase motivation level of my ESL students to read and write English through the use of Facebook as a teaching tool? Q2. How can the use of Facebook help in improving grammar skills of my ESL students? 6. Methodology The primary focus of my study is to solve the problem of my ESL classroom—turning low motivation into higher motivation for learning English. For this purpose Action Research model is the best. Action Research solves any practical problem of a particular group through planned intervention in the day-to-day working. Noffke (1997) describes that Action Research in education is to understand and solve problems. Kemmis & McTaggart (1988) defined Action Research as a participatory, collaborative and self-reflective study to improve upon the existing situation. They proposed ‘plan-action-reflection’ cycle for this purpose. As the research questions focus on the increase in motivation level of my ESL students through a particular treatment, this study will be conducted in two cycles consisting of three steps each. First step will be the analysis of current situation. Second step will be intervention of Facebook technology. Third step will be the reflection on the action. 6.1. Research Site The research site is MADAM LAU KAM LUNG SECONDARY SCHOOL OF MIU FAT BUDDHIST MONASTERY located on 22 Castle Peak Road, Lamtei, Tuen Mun, Hong Kong, China. 6.2. Participants The target group will be a group of thirty-three girls from Grade 7 of ERS class. They are non-native speakers of English and have a low motivation level in reading English books.(Add more details if possible not necessary: their abilities, their test scores , demographics etc) 6.3. Data Collection, Intervention and Reflection For the situation analysis, the data for cycle one will be collected from the work of the last week of Spring Semester (February 2011 to June 2011). Detailed document analysis of student work will be conducted. Along with document analysis, Students’ Satisfaction Survey will be administered. Then the two-week intervention will be introduced after having a discussion on the situation analysis with all the participants of the study. Then, in reflection, again document analysis and Student Satisfaction Survey will be conducted. The results will be compared with the results of situation analysis. The details of data collection tools are give in 6.3.1 and 6.3.2. 6.3.1. Students Satisfaction Questionnaire I selected interval scale questionnaire to measure the students motivation level . Numerous researches has applied this tool to measure students motivation towards any specific subject (Tuana, Chinb, & Shiehc, 2005; Wong,2010).The Student Satisfaction Questionnaire (Appendix I) will be administered two times as detailed above. The questionnaire has been adapted from Wong(2010). Only eight items relevent to students’ motivation in learning English has been selected.The questionnare is five point Interval Scale that includes rating from poor, fair , good , very good, to Excellent. 6.3.2. Document Analysis As the second focus of my action research is grammar quality, students’ written work will be analyzed for the frequency of the mistakes. Therefore, I had chosen document analysis as one of my instruments. Creswell and Plano (2007) has established that Document analysis in qualitative research provides analytical understanding to study the trends and patterns emerging into the data. Thus, document analysis will show me the trend of students’ grammatical mistakes. 6.4. Data Analysis As there is not any sophisticated data analysis involved, I will use Microsfot Office Excel sheet to measure the mean of the students’ response on the Students’ Satisfaction Survey. Students’ level of motivation will be determined by the mean score of class on Students’ Satisfaction Survey. If the mean score of situation analysis is lesser than that of reflection, the impact of intervention would be positive. Through document analysis, weekly frequency of mistakes will be analyzed. To do this, first of all, major field of language errors will be identified such as spelling mistakes, tense mistake, etc. And then on weekly basis, the record of error analysis will be maintained. The downward trend in mistakes will reflect the positive effects of intervention. 6.5. Validity Issues Firstly, I am using an adapted tool (Students’ Satisfaction Survey) for data collection which has been developed for ESL research in Hong Kong. Thus, the context for which the tool had been developed is very close to that of mine context. Secondly, the other source of data collection is students’ routine work. Their actual performance will be analyzed to conduct the proposed error analysis. Thirdly, all the population has been sampled for the study. Fourthly, the data is to be collected from three sources: Students’ Satisfaction Survey, previous work of the students, and Facebook work of the students. Further, the results of the survey and document analysis will be discussed with all the participants. Moreover, two types of data methods have been incorporated into the study. Students Satisfaction Survey will provide a quantitative data where as document analysis will provide the qualitative data. 6.6. Ethical Issues I will inform all my participants of the study along with getting the written consent of the school management. I will discuss the whole process of study including the Students’ Satisfaction Survey, and document analysis with the participants of the study. I will also inform them on the potential mutual benefits of the study. Further, as I am using one adapted tools from Wong (2010), I will seek his written consent along with properlly acknolowedging the worthy contribution of the researchers. 7. Research Limitations The focus of this study is my ESL Grade 7 class. The targeted population is very small and specific group. All the population consist only of girls and all are using Facebook and all have little interest in English language learning. Scholars have warned the danger of the generalization of the results of any single research. (Kelly and Yin, 2007) Hence , the results of this study may be of interest to other ESL teachers but may not be generalized. Another potential problem is the effective use of ICT. Many a times, technology provides such a different array of activities that the users forget the real focus. As Davis and Merchant( 2009) has pointed out that in ICT, C for communication is often overlooked. Thus, I will have to keep all the activities on track through continuous monitoring and feedback to the girls. Works Cited 100 Ways You Should Be Using Facebook in Your Classroom. (2009, October). Retrieved April 27, 2011, from OnlineCollage.org: http://www.onlinecollege.org/2009/10/20/100-ways-you-should-be-using-facebook-in-your-classroom/ Bedford, A., & Golbeck, D. J. (2008, Februray). Facebook as Pedagogical Tool? Retrieved April 27, 2011, from Teaching and Learning News: http://www.cte.umd.edu/teaching/newsletter/2007-08/Feb_March_HTML/Facebook.htm Bomia, L., Beluzo, L., Demeester, D., Elander, K., Johnson, M., & Sheldon, B. (1997). The impact of teaching strategies on intrinsic motivation. Champaign, IL Bowen, G. (2009). Document Analysis as a Qualitative Research Method. Qualitative Research Journal, 9, 27-40. boyd, d. m., & Ellison, N. B. (2007). Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. Childs, E. (2009, December). Using Facebook as a Teaching Tool. Retrieved April 27, 2011, from PraxisWiki: http://praxis.technorhetoric.net/index.php/Using_Facebook_as_a_Teaching_Tool Creswell, J & Plano, C. VL. (2007). Designing and conducting mixed methods research. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Davis, J., & Merchant, G. (2009). Web 2.0 for Schools: Learning and Social Participation. New York: Peter Lang Publishing,Inc. Freire, P. (1998). Pedagogy of freedom: Ethics, democracy, and civic courage. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. Hinchey, P. H. (2001). Finding freedom in the classroom: A practical introduction to critical theory. New York: Peter Lang Kemmis, S. & McTaggart ,R. (1988), The action research reader .Deakin, Vic: Deakin University Press. Kazeniac, A. (2009, February). Social Networks: Facebook Takes Over Top Spot, Twitter Climbs. Retrieved April 30, 2011, from Competeplus: http://blog.compete.com/2009/02/09/facebook-myspace-twitter-social-network Kushman, J.W., Sieber, C., & Heariold-Kinney, P. (2000). This isn't the place for me: School dropout. In D. Capuzzi & D.R. Gross (Eds.), Youth at risk: A prevention resource for counselors, teachers, and parents (3rd ed., pp. 471-507). Alexandria, VA: American Counseling Association. Littlewood, W. ( 2001). Students' attitudes to classroom English learning: a cross-cultural study. Language Teaching Research , 1 3-28 . Liu, N.-F., & Littlewood, W. (1997). Why do many students appear reluctant to participate in classroom learning discourse? System , 371-384 . Mangal, S.K.(2002).Advance Educational Psychology. New Delhi: Prentice-Hall of India. Mayher, J. S. (1990). Uncommon sense: Theoretical practice in language education. Portsmouth, N.H.: Boynton Melanie, W., & Warhurt, C. (2000). “In most classes you sit around table and get lecture at...": Debats,assessments and students learning. Teaching in Higher Education , 33-49. Noffke, S.E. (1997). Professional, personal, and political dimensions of action research. In Review of research in education, ed. M. Apple, 305–43. Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association. Ormrod, J.E.(1998).Educational Psychology: Developing Learners.New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. Pennington, M. C., Brock, M. N., & Yue, F. (1996). Explaining Hong Kong students'next term response to process writing: An exploration of causes and outcomes. Journal of Second Language Writing , 227-252 . Roman-Perez, R. I. (2003). Whatever Works: Electronic Chicken Soup for Reluctant ESL Writers. The Clearing House , 310-314. Smith, E. (1997). Reading without nonsense. New York: Teachers College Press. Strong, R., Silver, H.F., & Robinson, A. (1995). What do students want? Educational Leadership, 8-12. Tuana, H.-L., Chinb, C.-C., & Shiehc, S.-H. (2005). The development of a questionnaire to measure students’ motivation towards science learning. International Journal of Science Education , 639-654. Wong, R. M. (2010). Mainland Students Learning English in Hong Kong: Does Place-of-origin Affect Motivation? TESOL Journal , 109-129. Appendix I Students’ Satisfaction Survey This questionnaire contains statements about your opinion about this English class. You are requested to express your opinion on each statement. There are no “right “ or “wrong” answers. Your opinion is what is wanted. Think about how well each statement describes your opinion about participating in this class.Draw a circle around any of the number 0 being bad and 4 being excellent Question Excellent Very Good Good ok Bad 1 The English I am learning in English lessons can be used in my daily life. 4 3 2 1 0 2 I like English class activities. 4 3 2 1 0 3 I could learn better English if my English teacher controls me less 4 3 2 1 0 4 I am very interested in what my English teacher is teaching me. 4 3 2 1 0 5 I believe I can learn English well 4 3 2 1 0 6 I am not afraid to make mistakes in English homework. 4 3 2 1 0 7 So far I am happy with my progress in learning English. 4 3 2 1 0 8 I like what I am learning in my English lessons. 4 3 2 1 0 Adapted from : Wong, R. M. (2010). Mainland Students Learning English in Hong Kong: Does Place-of-origin Affect Motivation? TESOL Journal , 109-129. Note: The author belongs to Hong Kong Institute of Education, Hong Kong Read More