Making Reading and Writing more Purposeful with WebQuests

A recurrent worry that often troubles English teachers is the challenge of finding the best way to make their students develop higher order thinking skills while learning the required language skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing.  With the increase in the rate of mobile usage among students nowadays, incorporating an inquiry-based tool into the English lesson could help an effective way to encourage students to develop their language skills in an exciting yet purposeful way. More so, students are usually more interested in activities that are task-based because of the sense of accomplishment that usually result from the completion of such project-oriented activities. Hence, incorporating a set of task-based tool in the classroom can help develop their analytic and evaluative skills. 

Thank God! such online inquiry-based learning tool, called Webquests, exists and was started by Bernie Dodge and Tom March in 1995. Today, there is a website, The Quest Garden with a large repository of different lessons available for free on the internet that could be integrated into the English lessons as well as, resources to create new ones.  As such, this week, I will be blogging about a webquest, An English Holiday I found interesting and effective for teaching students reading and writing. 

WebQuest: An English Holiday

An English Holiday is a webquest created by Michelle Malone, GooIsby ES, which requires students to plan a trip to England and create a travel brochure and map which include detailed information of the lists of places, costs of transportation and activities they would embark on for such a trip. The webquest contains a set of interesting activities that would require learners to surf the internet about England, one of the favorite countries in the world for many second language learners.  Therefore, junior secondary school students can easily be taught reading and writing with the tool as it required them to visit the website links provided on the webquest to draw out the information needed to create the brochures and maps which they would present to the class.

Structure

Just like every webquests, An English Holiday also has both the  teacher and student pages. On the students' page, as shown in the image sideways, there are seven other pages which students are required to click on to get the appropriate information required for them to achieve the task given. The first page has the webquest's introduction where a brief  opening is given using the flag of England, a favorite country for many second language learners of English and a brief address which makes the webquest appealing. The task page gives a compelling overview of what the activities entail using some beautiful images about England while the process page reveals a well-detailed step-by-step activities, that students are required to execute to achieve their task. On the process page are inserted website links through which students can find information to solve each of the steps on the page. These links provide students with the necessary 

The evaluation page has the rubric that would be used to assess students' accuracy of content, organisation, spellings, knowledge and writing while the conclusion page congratulates students on their ability to complete the task with website links showing the teachers' feedback and more facts about England.

Benefits

Supports the development of critical thinking skills

Generally, webquests are associated with constructivism, which is a learning approach that believes that learners actively constructs their own knowledge. And judging from the list of activities and online enquiry students need to engage in to achieve the task in An English Holiday, students would have to draw out information, analyse, evaluate, synthesize, and extrapolate information got thus, constructing learning experience for themselves. Thereby helping to develop their higher developing their higher-order thinking skills. 

Encourages group-learning

Additionally, since learners would work in groups to create the brochure and maps, the webquest helps to develop group learning. As students search for information together and attempt to complete the task, they have to discuss, disagree at some point, make compromises in order to agree together and by undergoing these processes, they are able to develop critical social skills of collaboration and team work, which are useful preparatory skills for their future life.

Lastly, students get to develop their reading and writing skills. More so, since reading and writing have now become purposeful doable tasks, which requires them to learn and write about England, a country which most of them imagine to visit one day. 

Limitations

Just like any other ICT tool, the webquests can only be applicable where students have access to technological devices such as smart phones or laptops and the internet as any task-like activities without those devices are not webquests. 

Another constraint of webquests is that it is easy for students to get distracted if not well monitored since they have the freedom to surf the internet for information to execute their task. 

Lastly, the activities involved in accomplishing a task on webquest requires lots of time which might extend beyond the lesson period.

Conclusion

In this week's post, I have introduced and discussed an example of webquest, An English Holiday that English teachers can integrate in the classroom to make the reading and writing lesson an exciting and engaging task. Though it has its limitations, however, with irresistible strengths and benefits as summarised below:

• engaging opening

• enjoyable and doable task

• well-detailed process

• facilitate higher order-thinking skills in students

• develop learners' social skills

• improve students' reading and writing abilities.

To learn more about webquests, and how to create one for your class, watch Vincenzo Marranvideo below:

image credits according to order of use:

https://www.insightstoenglish.com/project/webquests-intro/

An English Holiday webquest on http://questgarden.com/147/00/7/120731094657/index.htm

critical thinking skills picture made from Canva

group working together by Rawpixelimages on dreamstime

video by Vincenzo Marranca

Literacy picture made from Canva