The Impact of Technological Tools to the Writing Skills of BSED English Major Students at Bestlink College of the Philippines

Vol.3, No.1C

Abstract

Technology has panoramically transformed the landscape of people’s lives since its emergence and is still continuously doing so. The traditional or primitive ways of doing things were modernized and innovated to answer the needs of various dynamic trends. Education is not excluded from these. One of the primary productive skills among all other core learning areas a student must learn is writing. This study aimed to describe how technological tools impacted the writing skills of the English Major students at Bestlink College of the Philippines, particularly the 4th-year students. The researchers desired to measure the effects of these digital tools in the different areas of the student’s writing skills. The result of the study led to suggested guides presented and proposed to help improve their writing skills.

The researchers utilized simple random sampling to select 30 different 4th-year BSED English Major students among the total population with varying demographics as to age, gender, and number of years of technology exposure and usage. The data collected and computed presented the results qualitatively.

Most female students (73.3%) in their mid-20s’ (50%) who have been using technological tools in writing for more than a decade (43.3%) always use Microsoft Word (4.5 weighted mean) among other tools, where Vocabulary (4.5 weighted mean) is always the feature they commonly utilized. The technological tools and their features are highly impacting the students’ different areas of writing skills, particularly Essay Writing (4.1 overall weighted mean), Formal Business Writing (3.89 overall weighted mean), and Memorandum Letter (4.20 overall weighted mean). As to being future educators, these technological tools are also highly impacting in terms of the students’ Lesson Planning (4.14 overall weighted mean), Preparation of Reports (4.12 overall weighted mean), and Classroom Instructions (4.34 overall weighted mean). 

The results revealed that technological tools play a major role in students’ mental capacities to write. Thus, they highly suggested improving their writing skills, including balancing dependency on the tools’ spelling and grammar correction features and practising writing shorter but substantial content. Others suggested comparing edited works against unedited and spotting the mistakes and corrections made. Some added to take note of commonly misspelt words corrected and to draft works on a notepad (without the spelling and grammar correction).