Educational Technology to Enhance EFL Learners’ Research Skills: The Case of Third- Year Students at Naama University Center, Algeria

Abstract

To cope with the spectacular progress of technology, university education in Algeria has placed a lot of emphasis on delivering instructions through the eLearning platform. This paper explores the usefulness of eLearning in improving the students’ learning experiences to undertake research projects. No empirical studies have been conducted on the efficacy of online teaching research methodologies in Algerian EFL contexts. The current research tries to show and an in-depth look at the efficacy of teaching the Research Techniques module online. It attempts to answer the question: To what extent has the e-Learning platform been effective in teaching/learning research methods to Algerian EFL students? To this aim, the researcher’s gleaning of data was from a questionnaire distributed to 86 third-year students of English in the department of foreign languages at Naama University Center and a semi-structured interview with three teachers from the same context. The findings reported that e-learning has influenced the educational process and positively affected students’ knowledge construction and reflexivity. It has also increased their personal and empirical skills to conduct research projects despite some challenging features. This research will be of broad interest to EFL teachers willing to use eLearning in their methodology courses besides improving their teaching. The reported acceptability of eLearning might be utilized to influence policy and counter the traditional teaching methods used in Algerian institutions. Furthermore, although the finding is not generalizable, it does include features that instructors in other contexts may find valuable