Electronic texts or learning through textbooks: An experimental study

Abstract

This is an experimental study in the area of Didactics applied to the learning of English as a foreign language and complemented by CALL. The main objective of this work is to know the degree of incidence existing between two groups of students: one, based on conference-style classes where students, guided by the teacher, have to search for information about a topic in the computer lab and present it in front of the class and, in the other, where students are taught by the teacher according to a printed text. The experimental design consisted of a pre-test/post-test plus the application of different techniques to develop the different linguistic and cognitive strategies, between these tests. The methodology used by the Experimental Group forced learners to generate their own knowledge, so they had to apply the information and work by themselves in Workshops; and the Control Group participated in the classroom according to the communicative approach, guided by the teacher in the traditional class. Statistics were applied to the scores obtained between both tests, and the scores obtained weekly in the different competences contributed to knowing whether there were significant differences between both groups.