Exchanging e-mails: A way to enhance language learners' communicative writing skill

Abstract

These days, communications technology has found its way not only in education but also in people's every day life. In fact, if there is no computer, one can hardly do his daily routines including letter writing and correspondence with ease and satisfaction. Keyboard and screen have taken the place of paper and pencil. One can find just a bunch of flyers in the post boxes, but rarely letters. The purpose of the present study was to find out whether e-mail exchange can be considered a tool to enhance the communicative writing of language students. For this objective, a number of 120 language learners at Shiraz Islamic Azad University and Zand Institute of Higher Education were selected. After a pre-test of writing indicated they were homogeneous, they were divided into two groups. The first group did not have any special training, except writing paragraphs, whereas the second group exchanged e-mails with their peers along with paragraph writing. A posts-test of writing was administered after the treatment. The comparison between the writing performances of the participants revealed those having e-mail exchange could outperform their peers, implying that e-mail exchange can be considered a useful tool to enhance the EFL students' communicative writing.