Integrating CALL and genre theory: a proposal to increase students' literacy

Abstract

The use of computer programs that can be used to correct and assess students' written work in the EFL classroom has become more commonplace within the last decade. This paper discusses the role of CALL in the process of data collection, standardisation of assessment criteria and compilation of the number of errors in the areas of grammar learning and its application to L2 writing. Students benefited from the correction process and showed increased grammatical awareness through the corrected feedback. However, the analysis of the results after the first correction phase demonstrated that the students had improved less than expected. For this reason, in the second year, Genre Theory was adopted as a theoretical framework so that students would become aware of the relationship between the structure and shape of texts in order to be effective in a particular context, and to achieve the goals of a particular culture. As proponents of the genre approach, we argue that making the genres explicit and showing how to write them will help students to be aware of how knowledge is structured in different written genres. A careful selection of text types was made at the beginning of the year so that improvement in the students' writing not only depended on the CALL system being used, but also on the different genres or text types used as class material. In this study, we intend to demonstrate that the combination of new technologies in the classroom and Genre Theory helped students to increase their writing competency. Our research highlights the relationship between literacy, new technologies, and effective writing with an emphasis on the educational application.