A moodle course to help university students develop academic writing skills

Resumen

Fifth semester students enrolled in the Bachelor in Education with an Emphasis in English at a private university in Cartagena, Colombia, take content-based courses, among which is Second Language Acquisition II (SLA II). As part of the course, students are required to read academic papers for class debates as well as writing academic reflection papers. However, the experience of one of the teacher-researchers who participated in this study reveals that at the beginning of these courses, most of the students seem to lack the necessary academic reading and writing skills to complete the assignments properly. In response to this situation, we proposed a dual pedagogical

intervention that included a 15-hour pre-semester course in academic writing and a subsequent academic writing course in Moodle (a free e-learning platform).This paper describes the effect of the latter on the academic writing skills of 16 students in a SLA II class. Findings suggest that using a Moodle course might not be the most appropriate strategy to help students develop their academic writing skills in the context implemented. The evidence gathered through a survey lends support to the claim that students in our community are still not prepared to take advantages of online courses as much as they do of classroom-based instruction.

Keywords:

e-learning, university students, academic writing, writing skills