THE EFFECT OF EDMODO ON RAILWAY ENGINEERING STUDENTS’ ACADEMIC WRITING AND PERCEPTIONS

With the rapid growth in technology and the use of information technologies in today’s language teaching and learning, a recent educational site known as Edmodo came to vogue. Since writing is considered as the most demanding skill in technical English courses, this study was conducted to explore the effectiveness of Edmodo as a novel pedagogical platform on Railway Engineering students’ academic writing. It also aimed to determine their perceptions of the advantages and challenges of writing academic texts via Edmodo. The participants were 20 railway engineering students at Iran University of Science and Technology. A language proficiency test, a pretest, midtest, and a posttest followed by three open-ended questions were the instruments of this study. The analysis of the data showed that Edmodo had a positive impact on improving railway engineering students’ writing performance. The results also revealed that low speed of uploading and access to Edmodo and uncertainty about the submission of the tasks were the most frequent drawbacks of Edmodo, whereas cooperation and sharing comments about other classmates’ writings, having access to others’ production, assisting classmates in solving their writing problems, using their comments and style of writing as a model for improving writing were the benefits reported by the students, respectively.