ANALYSIS OF THE DIFFICULTIES FOUND BY LEARNERS IN THE PROCESS OF ADAPTATION TO A METHODOLOGY BASED ON A VIRTUAL LEARNING COMMUNITY FOR THE TEACHING OF A C1 LEVEL ENGLISH WRITING COURSE

This work is part of the Doctoral Thesis written by the author in September 2011, and describes the difficulties found in the process of adaptation of a group of learners of a specialised course on English writing at C1 level as described in the CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference) to the methodology used in this course, based on a VLC (Virtual Learning Community) created with this purpose.

All the students who applied for this course were adults and had a high level of English as well as a great interest in improving their writing skills. Most of them had previous qualifications in other areas of knowledge and met the requirements established for the admission in this course, the most relevant of which were to be in possession of a B2 level certificate of English or equivalent and to have a medium level in the use of ICT (Information and Communication Technology).

Due to the virtual character of the course and the new methodology established for it, students had to adapt to new ways of communication and creation of knowledge, which presented some difficulties to the learners involved in the process and which obliged them to develop different strategies that would finally overcome those problems.

The course was developed in a virtual environment based on the LMS (Learning Management System) Moodle which was used to create the VLC, making an intensive use of most of the tools provided by this LMS, especially the ones that foster student-student and teacher-student communication. The course took six months and was structured in different content sections.

The main objective of this work was to analyze the difficulties found by the learners as members of a VLC in the process of adaptation to the methodology and the tools used in the development of the course, as well as to study to what extend this could be a real hindrance in their learning process.

Results:
The results of the study show that the members of the VLC were able to follow the course and its contents easily and they found this methodology challenging and attractive. All of them made an effort to adapt to the new methodology without a negative impact on the objectives of the course. They all made use of the suggested tools with different levels of difficulty, depending on the student and the tool.

All the tools proposed were used and the activities carried out satisfactorily, although, as expected, with different degrees of achievement.