Online strategies to foster autonomous English learning in virtual environments: the case of the COMALAT European Project
- Autores: Copelia Mateo Guillén
- Directores de la Tesis: Teresa Morell Moll (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat d'Alacant / Universidad de Alicante ( España ) en 2020
- Idioma: inglés
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Francisco Yus Ramos (presid.), María Noelia Ruiz Madrid (secret.), Breffni O' Rourke (voc.)
- Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Filosofía y Letras por la Universidad de Alicante
- Materias:
- Enlaces
- Tesis en acceso abierto en: RUA
- Resumen
In the technological world that characterizes the 21st century society, new specialized developments are applied immediately to the different social environments and, especially, in education. Language teaching is no stranger to this unstoppable progress, thanks to the widespread implementation of the internet and of the web 2.0 in particular.
New technologies help and can sometimes replace the more traditional systems used in foreign language teaching by favoring autonomous learning at any time and in any place. In this doctoral thesis, I review the literature on foreign language learning motivation, styles, and strategies applied to autonomous online platforms. This is done to present and describe the theoretical underpinnings of the COMALAT virtual learning platform, which was designed and created at the University of Alicante as a European Project in cooperation with the University of Siegen in Germany and the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece. Then, I report on a quantitative study that explores the attitudes, learning styles and strategies of 80 A2-B1 level EFL university students that make use of COMALAT. Besides determining the profile of the participants, the study aims to demonstrate the effects of previous training in online language learning strategies. As main conclusions, the following stand out: (a) the students’ use of this platform increases their level of foreign language learning as they can adapt it at their own pace and dedication; (b) the virtual learning environment provides a greater learning effectiveness by combining materials which consider the different learning styles; and (c) the application of the appropriate online learning strategies can help students to solve the different learning problems they may encounter while doing a self-directed online language course.
