The use of the Socrative App as an innovative technological tool to carry out formative assessment activities related to reading comprehension for EFL learners

Abstract

This research-work was conducted in a public high-school in Loja-Ecuador. The purpose was to experiment the integration of Socrative, a student response system (SRS), as a technological tool to carry-out EFL formative assessment activities regarding reading comprehension instruction. To do it, two groups of students, who were coursing the last year of secondary education, were intervened as control and experimental groups. The initial English language proficiency of both groups was heterogeneous, due to learners had different prior knowledge. Then to conduct this study an intervention plan aligned to contemporary reading-comprehension-instruction, national-curricular-standards, and classroom-assessment-principles was designed and implemented along three months. The unique difference among the two groups was the mechanism used to provide formative-assessment-feedback. With the control-group, conventional strategies were used, while with the experimental-group Socrative was used. A pre- and post- survey, a pre- and post- questionnaire, a pre- and post- test, and an observation worksheet were used as instruments. As result, the experimental-group participants achieved better results regarding metacognitive-reading-strategies development, reading-motivation increases, purposes-for-reading English texts expansion, reading reluctance decreases, and reading-comprehension-performance improvement, in comparison with the control-group.