Analysis of Iranians’ Writing Performances in Virtual and Real Environments

Writing has always been considered an important literacy skill for foreign/secondlanguage learners. The Internet provides such unique applications for the writingskill as weblogs, wikis, and social networking websites. Up to now researchershave put their focus on the learners’ performances in the traditional paper andpencil environment or wikis and blogs; it is time to also consider learners’performances in the social networking websites. In this respect the purposes of thepresent study were to (a) to identify the most frequent Iranian learners’ errors inthe virtual environment of social networking websites, and (b) compare thelearners’ performances in the traditional and virtual environments. With respectto the requirements of the research questions, this study had two phases of datacollection. For the first phase, the researchers selected 30 Iranians, male andfemale, aged 18 to 21 from one of the social networking websites and collected a3200-word corpus from among their comments and wall posts. All of the learnerswere students of Computer Engineering and IT. For the second phase of the study,another 3200-word corpus were collected from 30 Iranians, male and female, aged18 to 21, who were studying Computer Engineering and IT at SheikhbahaeeUniversity. They were asked to write an essay on an assigned topic. The analysis ofthe results revealed that three most Iranian participants’ errors were verb forms,diction, and prepositions in the virtual environment. Based on the results of the ttest,Mann-Whitney, and Chi-square tests interesting similarities and differenceswere observed within and between error groups in each corpus.Keywords: Writing Performance; Social Networking Website; Virtual Environment;Real Environment.

کلیدواژه ها:

Writing Performance ، Social Networking Website ، Virtual Environment ، Real Environment