Abstract:

The impact of ICT in the learning and teaching context is something that we cannot avoid. In fact, even the literacy development of the population is changing and adapting to these new realities of using technologies on everyday life. In education, we also have to use these technologies in order to promote literacy development and to prepare students for the new demands posed by the transition to an information-oriented society. Simultaneously, research findings in the role of ICT for literacy development are growing and showing that there are advantages in using ICT in language classrooms (e.g. Oxford, 1997; Penrod, 2007; Hendron, 2008).

In this paper, we will present some practices and results of the use of ICT in the language classroom for collaborative writing purposes in French as a Second Language class. In particular, we report the first stage of a study conducted during the last academic year where students were encouraged to write a text using Google Docs. The paper explores the students´ attempt to write collaboratively, to correct the text and to regulate the collaborative work.

Keywords:

Literacy, Language teaching and ICT, Computer Supported Collaborative Work, Collaborative writing, writing competences, Google docs.