To Post or Not to Post: Exploring Students’ Writing Strategies in a COVID-stricken Classroom

To Post or Not to Post: Exploring Students’ Writing Strategies in a COVID-stricken Classroom Jennifier T. Diamante Romualdo A. Mabuan Emmalyn T. Venturillo Western Philippines University Far Eastern University Western Philippines University Palawan, Philippines Manila, Philippines Palawan, Philippines jennifier.diamante@wpu.edu.ph rmabuan@feu.edu.ph mmventurillo@wpu.edu.ph Abstract This study explores the affordances of microblogging as a strategy in improving the writing proficiency of students. A total of 125 college freshman students from a state university in the Philippines served as the respondents of the study. Four writing prompts were used for microblogging and personal essay writing. UAM Corpus Tool was used to describe the linguistic characteristics of the writing compositions produced by the respondents, while paired t-test and Mann-Whitney U test were used to statistically analyze the data. A Discourse Completion Task (DCT) was also employed to generate qualitative information to deepen the interpretation of the findings. To validate the ratings given by the researcher, an inter-rater who is also an English professor was invited to rate the data. Holistically, there is no statistical difference between the mean ratings obtained by the respondents in the two writing conditions. Analytically, there is a highly significant difference in sentence structure and a significant difference in terms of language use. Moreover, micro-blogging and personal writing have shown no significant difference in content, organization, and mechanics as revealed by the statistical results. Conclusions and recommendations were forwarded. Pedagogical implications were articulated based on the results of the investigation. 1 Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted not only the economic, political, and health-care system but also the academic set-up around the globe. The lockdown in response to the virus has forced educational institutions worldwide to adopt learning modalities that they deemed most appropriate and realistic for their learners given their available resources. As the new mode of teaching seems challenging to the teachers, its benefits to students are also being questioned. On the one hand, teachers had to adapt to the new pedagogical concepts and teaching mode delivery for which they may not have been trained. On the other hand, students, especially those in the marginalized groups, who do not have access to the digital learning resources or lack of resilience and engagement to learn on their own, are at risk of falling behind (Schleicher, 2020). In the Philippines, higher educational institutions (HEIs) had to replace face-to-face lectures with online and modular learning along with other modalities which they deemed necessary and appropriate for their contexts to ensure the safety of both teachers and students. While shifting to the new normal of teaching and learning poses great challenges to various stakeholders especially to the teachers and students, it creates an opportunity to explore new possibilities in pedagogy and research. This study, therefore, investigates how students perform academically in the digitalized learning environment particularly in their writing assignments. In the context of English as Second Language (ESL) teaching, writing is the most difficult English skill (Richards & Renandya, 2002) and the most difficult communicative macro skill to teach and master (Mabuan, …

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