Use of Padlet as a technological tool to improve non – English majored students’ writing skill

Abstract

Of the four basic language skills, writing seems to be the most difficult skill for learners to acquire. According to Richard and Renandya’ (2002) study, most of the participants struggled with writing since they had to create, organize ideas, and interpret them into comprehensible sentences. During the outbreak of Covid-19, the interaction between teachers and students was on the decline, which caused many problems for the two parties. In today’s world, the proliferation of technology brings many benefits to language learners; however, it is difficult to keep them motivated and engaged in lessons without a teacher’s physical presence. Hence, teachers must employ interactive virtual tools to monitor students’ progress and provide feedback to keep them interested. Hence, this case study presents Padlet, an interactive tool, to analyze how writing skill could be improved. The aims of this study are to investigate the effectiveness of using Padlet in the English course as well as the problems that students had to deal with. Moreover, the author aimed to find out the students’ attitudes towards Padlet after the course. The subjects of this research were 26 first–year non-English majors at the Academy of Journalism and Communication (AJC). Two sets of questionnaires, the assessment of students’ writing, and semi-structured interviews were employed to evaluate their writing performance and their opinions after the course. The results reveal that the respondents had positive responses towards Padlet.