Investigating the Impact of Using Facebook on the Elementary Students' Writing Ability at the Private Schools in Hebron
Bayan Rajeh Zatary, Hazem Bader
كلية الدراسات العليا-جامعة الخليل · فلسطين
In our Palestinian context, the need for improving our students' writing ability is crucial.Writing is usually taught traditionally and studentsdon’t practice writing outside the classroom.So, using noveltechniques and practices in the teaching and learning process can advance the students' language ability as well as their writing skills. For this purpose, this paper investigated the impact of using Facebook on the sixth grade students' writing ability at Al-Nukhbah and Al-Azhar Private Schools.The sample of the study consisted of 60 sixth grade students at Al-Nukhbah and Al-Azhar Private Schools in the second semester of the scholastic year 2015. For data collection, the researcher divided the participants into a control group and an experimental group to examine the effect of using Facebook on the students' writing skills. Both groups received the same material. The control group was taught how to write traditionally, whereas the experimental group was taught how to write by using Facebook. The researcher applied a pretest before conducting the study tool for both groups to examine equivalence in writing and to know their writing level. Both groups had almost the same scores which guaranteed that the participants of this study have about the same writing ability. Then, the researcher created a Facebook group and added all the students of the experimental group. The students were engaged in lots of writing tasks through using Facebook. The tasks focused on some main writing subskills such as grammar, spelling, punctuation and sentence control. This training program continued for 32 meetings (2 times a week). After the treatment which is using Facebook, the researcher applied a post test for both groups to check their writing skills improvement. In addition to that, an attitude questionnaire was distributed to the students of the experimental group to measure their attitudes towards using Facebook for educational purposes. The results were collected and analyzed by using statistical methods. On the basis of the findings, the researcher found that there is an obvious effect of using Facebook on improving the students' writing ability. Also, the students had positive attitudes towards using Facebook for educational purposes. Finally, the researcher recommended that teachers, decision makers, educational institutions and researchers should give more emphasis on using Facebook in teaching and learning besides to other social media.Abstract in Arabic .