The effectiveness of using blogs as a tool for teaching argumentative essays: a case study of pre-university students at the centre for foundation studies, International Islamic University Malaysia

Abstract

The study focused on students' motivation in learning how to write argumentative essay and its relation to the use of social networking website, blogging. It also focused on the effectiveness of the use of blog as a tool to teach students how to write essays. This study was conducted at the Center for Foundation Studies students of International Islamic University Malaysia. Presented in the paper is the students' perception on the use of blogging as a tool to learn how to write argumentative essays and how the features of blog help them to improve their writing that semester. The researcher was looking into the social cognitive theory of writing by Flower (1990, 1992) and motivation and computer for communication by Warshauer (1996) for theoretical framework. The questionnaire for the survey was piloted and administrated. A pre-test was conducted in the beginning of the semester and a post-test was conducted after the treatment (blogging) was exposed to the subjects. The subjects were the students of Arts programmes. The researcher noticed that her students were less interested and less motivated to learn how to write when she used the traditional methods of teaching: 1) discussion and 2) lecture in the classroom. Due to this, the researcher viewed that it was a worthwhile attempt to investigate if a different method such as using blogs could facilitate the teaching of writing. Data was gathered and analyzed using SPSS 11.5. Descriptive statistics is elaborated in the paper. Based on statistical data from the survey, there was substantial evidence to show a significant result that the students were more motivated to learn how to write argumentative essays. However, the findings from the quasi-experimental design showed startling results suggesting that the use of blog in teaching how to write essays was not effective in all components of the essay.