The contribution of etwinning project practices upon students' foreign language skills and the development of teaching profession (An action research)

This study aims to investigate the contribution of eTwinning project practices upon students' foreign language skills and the development of teaching profession. While the effect of eTwinning project practices on students' language skills (listening and speaking) and their participation level and manner constitute the student dimension of the study, the contribution to the development of professional skills of teacher's integrating technology to the teaching process constitute the teacher dimension. Action Research model is applied in the study. The researcher has researcher - teacher position in the study. Study group consisted of the students of 3/A class at a primary school in Isparta. Within the study, an eTwinning Project which aimed enrichment of English lessons with Web 2.0 tools is conducted. Following the review of literature regarding the issue, the applied Action Research is planned and the practice of a unit which was enriched in technologically – assisted way was investigated within the research. A scoring rubric, student outputs, student diaries, focus group discussions, researcher's diary, the narrations written by researcher regarding before and after the application process, photographs and video recordings, social media shares and WhatsApp group chat messages are data collection tools of the study. The acquired qualitative data was analyzed via the statistics of frequency and percentage and content analysis method. According to the results, eTwinning practice has affected the language skills of the students in a positive way. Moreover, it is concluded that the practice of eTwinning has influenced participation level of the students positively by increasing their willingness for the lesson. By the conducted action research, it is concluded that eTwinning practice has considerable contributions upon the professional development of the teacher in integrating technology to teaching process. Besides, the process of the conducted action research is one of the contributions of the study to the researcher teacher in professional development aspect. The practice of eTwinnning projects is a developmental process for both teachers and students in cognitive, affective and social dimensions. It is suggested this kind of project practices should be reinforced to be disseminated and that trainings be provided to the teachers who are eager to apply technologically enhanced teaching processes. The research can be applied with different age groups or it can be widened by including all project partners. Furthermore, a study to search in which stage of teaching process use of web 2.0 tools is more effective can be carried out or a similar practice can be applied by the use of an experimental design with a control group.