E-mail an easy way to motivate students write?

Students don't like much to write these days. But for language acquisition writing is indispensable. This week we've been given some ideas on how we can use technology to stimulate/motivate students to write. One of the simplest one was using e-mail in a pen pal exchange.

I am not new to pen pal idea of writing. I had this kind of experience with the 4^th grade 2 years ago, with the difference that we used actual paper letters and sent them through post. It was a correspondence between 4^th grade students from Rutland Elementary School, Vermont USA and 4^th grade students from George Calinescu Elementary School, Chisinau, Moldova. It was very successful and the children loved it! The only drawback was the fees for mailing and the time for the letters to get there and back. It lasted for 2 years and then it stopped. The USA students were hard to be kept track of once the class teacher changed.

Reading Chao-chih Liao’s article “E-mailing to Improve EFL Learners' Reading and Writing Abilities: Taiwan Experience” I understood that this could have been done through e-mail. But I couldn’t think of a way to give feed-back since it is hard for a teacher to interfere with personal e-mail. How could I correct mistakes, monitor their writing and keep it topic oriented. How to keep it under control? Well to all these questions I got an answer form the above article. The author used hard copies of student’s emails and corrected them. The author assigned week topics and they discussed them as a group. So e-mailing was taken out of the private context and was instruction oriented.

I also learned that there is a global educational network CPAW (Cyberspace Pals Across the World http://education.ucf.edu/international/cpaw1.cfm ) (founded by Dr. Malcolm Beazley an Australian educator) that links students/pen pals around the world. And I though that my students could possibly be a part of that project.