| With the development of information highway, the Internet is gradually being introduced in the second language classroom as language teachers become more familiar with it. In EFL writing class, the most popular way to utilize the Internet is Email key pal activity. Writing is of vital importance to second language acquisition. However, Chinese students experience great difficulties in English writing. The problem of how to improve EFL writing quality has puzzled language teachers. Email activity provides a new approach to solve this problem. Nevertheless, not much empirical research has been carried out concerning this area so far, the lack of which necessitates such an empirical study dealing with Email key pal activity and writing this thesis. The thesis is devoted to discover the possibilities of utilizing Email in English writing teaching and offer insights into how Email key pal activity can be used as a tool to develop students' writing skills, motivation, and their intercultural awareness and so on.The study aimed to seek answers to the following questions:1. What are students' attitudes toward participating in Email activities?2. To what extent does Email key pal activity facilitate students' writing skills?3. What are positive and negative aspects of using Email in developing their writing skills?4. What are problems students come across in Email key pal activity? And what are problem-solving approaches and techniques students adopt in this activity?5. What are the effects of Email on L2 discourse?The theoretical framework within which the investigation was conducted is social constructivism, learner autonomy and a communicative approach to writing.Subjects were 70 first-year students from two classes at Zhejiang Normal University. They majored in foreign trade English. One class was experimental group, the students in this group were asked to join in Email key pal activities for three months during the autumn semester 2002. The other class was control group. All the subjects of the two groups were given a pre-test and a post-test in writing at the beginning and end of the semester respectively. Those in the experimental group were required to finish a questionnaire and 10 among them were interviewed after they completed their Email activity session.A pool of data was collected from the experiment. Statistical analyses were carried out using SPSS 11.0. Independent-samples t tests were performed to look at if there are significant differences between the means for the experimental and control groups; paired-samples t tests were conducted to seek the possible difference between the results of pre-and post-tests of the experimental and control groups. Descriptive statistics were obtained from the questionnaire to see the beliefs held by students and their behaviors during the Email key pal activity session. The data collected from the interviews and students' letters were used to further explore their opinions about the Email activity.The study produced the following major findings. Generally speaking,it is found out that students had positive attitudes toward Email key pal activity and they had very high interest level. The benefits of using Email in an EFL writing class consist of the following: the activity has a positive statistically impact on the improvement of writing skills, themean score of the experimental group in the pre-writing test was lower than that of the control class, but in the posttest, just the reverse. However, independent-samples t tests showed that the differences between the pretest and the posttest's total scores for the experimental group were not significantly different from the control group. Probably this resulted from the inadequate experimental time and the informal style of Email. The paired-samples t test indicated that in the experimental group, there were significant differences between the score of the total, content and organization in the posttest and that of the pretest; in addition, Email can encourage students to write in realistic, authen... |
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