Innovation in Language Learning

In the learning of a foreign language, for a long time it has been assumed that essay writing is an individual task, a situation which researchers like Hamdaoui (2006), Susser (1994), and Weissberg (2006) are proposing should not be the case. I base my contribution to this research on interactionist and collaborative learning theories. I scientifically examine the impact of communication among students through face-to-face conversation and synchronous computer mediated interaction when they write essays in Swahili on their own. The researchers I have mentioned propose that essay writing is a social process that requires concerted efforts, just like other social undertakings. This approach is what I term interactive and collaborative since the participants in the process get an opportunity to exchange ideas and benefit each other in different ways before getting into the actual task of writing their own essays.

The participants in the study were ten second year students of Swahili language at a major university in the US Midwest who were in their fourth semester of Swahili.  All ten students had five fifty-minute computer mediated pair interactive sessions and another five face-to-face pair interactive sessions. Immediately after the conclusion of the above-mentioned interactive activities, I asked each student to write an individual essay in Swahili for a period not exceeding 30 minutes in which a student discussed the topics of the previous interactive activity. I also conducted interviews with each participant in order to get their views on the two methods of communication they used. At the end of the study, in Week 12, I also asked the participants to fill out a general perception questionnaire in order to get further information on their views on the two modes of interaction.