Glogging in the ESP Classroom: Developing Tourism Studies Students’ EFL Persuasive Writing

Tourism discourse is highly persuasive. To succeed in their future careers, university students majoring in Tourism Studies should therefore be able to write persuasively in English. This study investigated the effect of glogging on developing EFL persuasive writing in such learners. Participants (N = 16) were second-year students in the Tourism Studies Department, Faculty of Tourism and Hotels, University of Sadat City, during the second semester of the 2018-2019 academic year. An EFL persuasive writing test was developed and administered before and after experimentation, which lasted for 9 weeks. During this time, students used glogging collaboratively to create online interactive posters via the web-based tool Glogster EDU. They wrote tourist advertisements and persuasive essays. The results revealed that the study group achieved significant improvement in EFL persuasive writing. Using Glogster EDU was fundamental in helping students to organize, synthesize, revise, edit, and enrich their work with appropriate visuals, persuasive vocabulary, and grammatically correct and appealing phrases or sentences until they published their final drafts. Thus, glogging had a positive effect on developing Tourism Studies students’ EFL persuasive writing.