شبكة المعلومات العربية التربوية

The current study focuses on the impact of Facebook as an online environment on learning coherence and cohesion in higher education. It investigates whether using Facebook as an academic tool would lead the involved participants second year students of English in the department of English, University of Mouloud Mammeri, Tizi-Ouzou to write more coherent essays. It also investigates students’ cohesion and coherence problems in English as a foreign language (EFL) essay writing. To reach this objective, an experimental research design has been adopted. It involves the comparison of the essays written by a control group (CTR) and an experimental group (EXP) during a pre- and a post-test in terms of cohesion and coherence. An additional research tool, namely an online questionnaire has been used to get an idea about the participants’ motivation and attitudes towards the use of Facebook as an academic learning tool. The results obtained show significant differences between the EXP group and the CTR group. The former made a noticeable progress concerning the different aspects of coherence and cohesion, whereas the latter did not demonstrate a considerable improvement. In other words, the findings validate the idea that the use of web based instruction as an additional segment to classical in-class writing instruction is considerably more pertinent and appropriate than writing instruction dealing exclusively with traditional teaching. (Author’s abstract)