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The Effect of E-mail Project on Enhancing EFL Learners' Academic Writing Skills
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, Penn State University, United States

E-Learn: World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education, in Montreal, Canada ISBN 978-1-880094-46-4 Publisher: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE), San Diego, CA

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Abstract

This paper aims to report the findings of a study conducted to examine if E-mail is an effective tool in enhancing EFL students' academic writing skills. The participants in this study consisted of 8 college students majoring in English as a foreign language in a senior college in Taiwan. Each student was assigned one or two key-pals from eight countries. The findings suggested that although e-mail was proved to be an "authentic communicative writing activity" (Weasenforth &Biesenbach-Lucas 1998), it provided little or no benefits in improving students' overall academic writing skills. However, E-mail exchange provides an authentic audience that promotes two-way communication and its spontaneous nature and "informal conversational texts"(Marcus 1995) responds to most EFL professionals' belief that language acquisition is more likely to take place when there is a purpose to communicate and there exists an anxiety-free circumstance to do so.

Citation

Lin, H. (2002). The Effect of E-mail Project on Enhancing EFL Learners' Academic Writing Skills. In M. Driscoll & T. Reeves (Eds.), Proceedings of E-Learn 2002--World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education (pp. 1810-1813). Montreal, Canada: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE). Retrieved April 23, 2021 from .

© 2002 Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE)

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References

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