THE IMPACT OF WRITTEN PRODUCTION AND INTERACTION ACTIVITIES ON STUDENTS’ EDUCATIONAL RESULTS: A COMPARATIVE STUDY

doc. Zuzana Hrdličková, University of Trnava, Slovakia

Abstract

To increase overall English language proficiency requires achieving general competences and communicative language competences, engaging in communicative language activities and pursuing communicative language strategies. Since the skill of writing is one of the most difficult ones, in the course of two terms, close attention was paid to developing students’ linguistic and discourse competences, with the focus on vocabulary, grammatical accuracy and designing texts, including generic aspects such as thematic development, and coherence and cohesion. In the present paper, in production and interaction activities an emphasis is placed on written production and written interaction. Productive activities like presentations, written studies and reports, and the like have an important function in both academic and professional fields. Judgments are made about the linguistic quality of what has been submitted in writing to Moodle or MS Teams. Ability in the formal production is not acquired naturally; it is a product of literacy learnt through education and experience. It involves learning the conventions of the genre concerned. To improve the quality of formal production, strategies are employed. The paper aims to investigate whether continuous work on doing written assignments affected students’ educational results. In the language classroom, undergraduates of Trnava University in Trnava and the University of Economics in Bratislava, Slovakia, participating in the KEGA project, did communicative language activities and implemented strategies that also occur in the real world. Having finished academic courses in English for Specific Purposes and English for Academic Purposes, and in line with CEFR C1 Level, they should produce clear, well-structured texts of complex subjects, underlining the relevant salient issues, expanding and supporting points of view at some length with subsidiary points, reasons and relevant examples, and rounding off with an appropriate conclusion. By comparing the beginning-of-term and end-of-term professional tests via a t-Test, the research findings have revealed that the differences between them are statistically significant. Based on these results, implications for further research and pedagogical practice will be recommended.

Keywords: production, interaction, text, linguistic competence, discourse competence