ARTICLE REVIEW

Article : Adopting Social Networking Sites (SNSs) as Interactive Communities among English Foreign Language (EFL) Learners in Writing 

The article that I chose for this task is Adopting Social Networking Sites (SNSs) as Interactive Communities among English Foreign Language (EFL) Learners in Writing : Opportunities and Challenges is taken from English Language Teaching journal, Volume 6, Number 11, page 187 - 198. This article was written by Norizan Abdul Razak, Murad Saeed and Zulkifli Ahmad. All three of them are from Faculty of Science and Humanities, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Bangi, Selangor, Malaysia. 

This main focus of this article is to investigate the opportunities and challenges of SNSs as learning environment in writing. In research questions, the authors further explains the aims of this study by stating these three questions :

1. Does the Facebook group as an online learning community foster the EFL learners' collaboration and interaction in paragraph writing activity?
2. How does the Facebook group as an online learning community foster the EFL learners' collaboration and interaction in paragraph writing activities?
3. How do the EFL learners describe their learning experience in writing activities in this Communities via Practice (CoP) via Facebook?

This study was conducted through an online Community of Practices (CoP) which is a Facebook page called Only for English Learning Facebook. 

It was developed and maintained by a few instructors in English. It adopted a mixed of action research approach to data collection in order to answer the research questions. In this study, a blog was created by the instructors and it was connected to the page so that any new post in the blog will be published in the Facebook. The activities were scheduled twice a week which the participants practiced pre –writing, writing and post – writing. For the data collection, the instructors’ online writing posts and participants’ online interaction exchanges were collected and saved by the researchers at the end of every activity. It served as a source of data for a quantitative analysis to answer research question one, then, the researchers reflected on the learners’ interactive dialogue, peer scaffolding and negotiation in the writing activities  to represent qualitative analysis to answer research question two. After that, the EFL learners’ responses to the online reflection discussions were subjected to a qualitative analysis to answer the third research question. For this research, the purposive sampling was used to choose the participants based on their levels of proficiency in English. The participants were chosen among 24 active and regular EFL learners (14 females and 10 males), coming from different EFL Arab countries. The result of this research stated that the writing activities as part of shared practice in this online community fostered the learners’ participation and engagement, thus the quantity of the EFL learners participation in the writing activities highly increased in the second session. The result also found out that the EFL’s learners’ interaction and engagement with the members of the CoP through posts and comments assisted them to enhance their writing in English. Through the online sample post writing paragraph, it showed that the EFL learners’ collaborating and scaffolding each other in revising their original paragraph as well as revised paragraphs. It shows that the participants viewed CoP as an interactive learning environment that enhances their writing.

Yes, the research does interest me because firstly, this article is related to my Academic Exercise topic which is "The Relationship between Digital Tools and Students' Writing Skills". I can relate to the main idea of this research and I can predict the direction of findings for this research paper. The topic of technology and language learning is always interesting because we know that technology is always evolving and with the help of technology, it can foster the language learning among students. Yes, I think this research was well conducted. It is not easy to gather response from students especially through online medium if the materials were not interesting enough to the students. However, the instructors were able to attract the students’ attention to participate, response and communicate with each other using online medium. At the same time, the issue brought by the researchers is very rational and contemporary to the educational setting. We are slowly moving to a new teaching and learning approach, and blended learning is a thing right now in Malaysian education system. The idea of learning to happen anytime and anywhere allows students to create their own learning style and foster individualized learning. Nevertheless, we should be aware that blended learning requires technology and whether we realize it or not, Malaysia is not yet fully competent in providing the facilities for blended learning. It is possible for schools in urban area to have more access to technology but schools in rural area might have difficulties to access the technology. Maybe further research or study can identify the solution to overcome this problem in Malaysia.