Whatsapp: A mobile instant messaging tool to enhance students' writing performance through dialogue journaling

Conducted in a mixed method design, this study attempts to explore the effects of WhatsApp and Pen and Paper dialogue journaling techniques on university students' writing performance in English language and also to compare their efficacy in terms of both writing success and students' attitudes toward the incorporation of these techniques into EFL classes. Forty-five freshmen students from Sociology department of Batman University, a state university in the south-east of Turkey, participated in the current study in three homogenous groups of 15, namely WhatsApp dialogue journaling (WDJ), pen and paper dialogue journaling (Pap DJW) and the control group, with respect to their writing success and the information they provided on a pre-questionnaire. The two experiment groups (WDJ and Pap DJW) received 12 treatment sessions having the same topics in each session while the control group had no treatment except weekly class requirements. During each session, students in WDJ group were expected to create online dialogues on the previously provided topics by the researcher through an online WhatsApp group on their smartphones in contrast to Pap DJW group who were required to respond their teacher with almost one page individual entries regarding the same topics as the compared group. Data relating to the efficacy of the two dialogue journal writing techniques on students' English writing skills were collected through a pre and post writing test administered to all groups. Considering the question on students' attitudes, both experiment groups were expected to answer an open ended questionnaire, including four questions, at the last treatment session. To ensure the reliability of the study, the results of the pre and post tests were scored by the same three English teachers through an analytic scoring scale for writing exams (adapted by Hemmati & Soltanpour, 2012). To analyze the quantitative results obtained from the pre and posttests, the researcher employed Paired-Samples T-test and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) to determine the differences in scores among the three groups. On the other hand, for the qualitative data provided by the open ended questionnaire on attitudes, a content analysis was applied. Upon analyzing the relevant data, all groups showed a significant progress in overall writing proficiency on the posttests when compared with their pretests. However, regarding the components of the writing skill namely organization, grammar, content, vocabulary and mechanics skills, vocabulary skills of WhatsApp group and organization skills of the control group were found to have not been affected significantly by the treatment or the class work as the other components while pen and paper group showed progress for all. Additionally, there was no significant difference among all these groups in terms of neither overall performance nor writing components. Finally, the participants in both pen and paper and WhatsApp group had positive attitudes towards integrating these dialogue journaling techniques into their writing. Key words: WhatsApp, dialogue journaling, writing performance, achievement in writing, English as a foreign language, pen and paper dialogue journaling, mobile learning, social media