The Effect of Facebook Writing Group on Ethiopian Secondary School Students’ Writing Performance and Quality of Paragraphs

Abstract

Teaching with widely accessed social media network tools like Facebook can positively contribute to students’ writing performance and quality of writing. However, teachers usually disregard Facebook because they doubt if it can be used as a platform for education. Therefore, this nested experimental design study investigated the effect of a Facebook writing group on students’ paragraph writing performance and the quality of paragraph writing. In order to achieve these, the researchers used randomly selected grade 11 students who were then randomly divided into two groups: experimental group and control group. The experimental group was taught paragraph writing in their Facebook writing group, whereas the control group was taught paragraph writing in a face-to-face (conventional classroom) situation. The researchers used pre-test and post-test to understand the effects of Facebook on students writing performance. An Independent sample T-test of the pre-test was used to check the equivalence between the experimental and control groups at the pre-intervention stage. Since the inferential statistical values for the pre-test mean of the control and the experimental groups were (t (.430), df=22, p=.671) at 0.05 level of significance, the groups were considered similar. The researchers used the same statistical test on the post-test to examine the impact of the treatment (the intervention). The study finding revealed that there was a statistically significant difference between the scores of the groups in favor of the experimental group as the inferential statistical values for the post-test mean difference between the groups were (t (3.442), df=22, p=.0.002) at 0.05 level of significance. The researchers attributed this considerable result to the effectiveness of using Facebook for paragraph writing. However, the qualitative analysis of 14 paragraphs of the Facebook writing group showed that the quality of the paragraphs was not to the standard. As a result, teachers should equally consider the quality of students’ writing in addition to the improvement in their performances when using Facebook writing groups for teaching writing. Coursebook writers should also include writing tasks involving technological tools like Facebook at least as extension activities to the classroom writing with adequate exercises on punctuation, spelling, grammar, capitalization, and organization.