Hello again,

Well, many more things had happened. I already finished the final version of the action research project as well as an article about it, with the aim of updating it and finding possible ways to publish it. I actually have a draft of the article, because I just hand in my project yesterday and I found it very difficult to update it appropriately without the project finished. For this reason, the process of writing and publishing the article is still in process. Here is the abstract I have so far for it:

ABSTRACT

This action-research project was carried out with 11 university students with an intermediate English level, majoring different careers and ranging from 18 to 25 years old. The project aimed to help these students to improve their formal letter writing skill through the use of blogs. The pedagogical intervention lasted six F2F lessons with independent work. Students created a blog, posted initial and final products, self-corrected their work and filled in a reflection log. Qualitative and quantitative data were gathered and trend analysis was implemented to come across the findings which evidenced that if students increase their motivation towards writing by means of technology, specifically with blogs, if they develop an autonomous learning behavior and if they carry out a self-correction routine it is possible for them to improve their formal letter writing skill. Finally, the use of blogs to improve formal letter writing skill was found to be helpful for English as a foreign language (EFL) contexts and to open doors for further research related to the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in the classroom.

Going back to my action research project, let me tell you that the final version I already sent is going to be assessed by my tutor and by two more readers. They will give me more comments in order to improve it before the graduation day. See you then with more news about the end of my action research project.

Long time no writing,

...but during this time many things had happened. After the application of my data collection tools, I had to read a lot in order to choose the best method for analyzing it. I decided to use trend analysis and it is still being a long journey trying to figure out the best way to illustrate the analysis in the action research paper. Some positive results have been drawn so far.

I was also working on the research paper which I have to hand in soon, but I do need more academic vocabulary and I still need to rearrange some information. Some of my bibliographic material is not very academic, so I think I have to pay more attention when choosing them.

Time flies and I have to finish soon. Let’s see how it goes.