Enhancing Student's Writing Skill

Nowadays, the Internet has become a complementary means not only for the pursuit of knowledge but also to disseminate knowledge. It is therefore important to take a look at Internet materials and use them as sources for learning in a more interesting way. One of the ways that can be used to achieve this aim is to ask the students to have an Internet account of Facebook, which is the focus of this teaching grant project.

The teaching of a language, like the teaching of many other fields of study, deals with two major aspects: what to teach (content) and how to teach (techniques). The types of content (materials) for language teaching are determined by factors such as the purpose of the language program and the need of the language learners (Dubin & Olshtain, 1986). The techniques of teaching performed by the teacher depend on the English language teaching approaches adopted in the classrooms. Although the two aspects of language teaching can be accomplished by the availability of a teacher alone, the use of language teaching media is likely to make teaching more interesting and make it more successful. Many language teachers have enthusiastically embraced networking technology and have developed innovative ways of using the technological facilities in language teaching and learning.

These various forms of technological facilities have shaped the way teachers teach language. With the need of information and communication in globalization, the role of technology, especially the Internet, cannot be ignored. One of the Internet facilities that has not been studied extensively is Facebook. With the advanced development of the Internet, this teaching grant project incorporates Writing II course activities with the Facebook (www.facebook.com), a new Internet offering which is of great interest due to its popular and attractive features.

Facebook is popular among others because of the following interesting features:

·       It can be used for asynchronous written communication (like email)

·       It can be used for synchronous written communication (online chat)

·       It can be used for group written communication (like mailing-list)

·       It can be used to store documents

·       It can be used to store pictures (like album)

·       It can be used to write a long text accompanied with a picture and can be responded.

·       It can record the data of the user’s “friends” and show them in a list with their profiles.

In this teaching, Facebook is used to improve students’ ability in writing essays, partly leaving the conventional nature of the “paper and pen” writing activities which are conducted in the classroom.