Hello readers, welcome to another ICT tool review. For this week, I bring you Wattpad (www.wattpad.com), a website that allows people to write their own fictional pieces of writing in a blog-like format. The website's aim is to encourage young and adult readers to create and make public their work done in Wattpad, with the possibility of being recognized by not only the website itself, but by external editorials which could make possible the distribution and selling on the writing done. Below I attach for you a piece of a novel I found on the website, It's called The origami code and it's written by the author that goes by the name of "chaoticminds".
The picture above shows the main plot of this novel written on Wattpad. Most of the readings I found on the website have this format, with some being longer than other ones and including more or less pictures and other visuals to complement the text. From the observations I could made, Wattpad can be a good and simple way to foster English learners' reading ability, specially for teenagers or younger students as a big part of the writers on Wattpad have a young age. Students could create and then share what they wrote using Wattpad, creating a good instance to practice writing and reading skills.
I believe that this particular tool can be relevant for language learning, as I stated before, most of the website's community is formed around teenagers and younger people, so it can be a way to attract students to take a look at the readings done on Wattpad by people of their similar age, and even start writing by having inspiration on previous readings posted on the site. From the many approaches, I would say that task based language teaching (TBLT) is the one that suits the most for this tool. Many tasks can be elaborated around Wattpad, making students work alone or collaboratively by creating their writings on the website to later share them among other students and have a revision by teachers.
As always, disadvantages or limitations can be present in these technological tools, and Wattpad doesn't make an exception. The first one I noticed is that students could encounter non-school-appropriate content. As the website allows writers to write about a wide variety of topics, some of the could be inappropriate for young students, as these writings could include inappropriate language or graphic images that is most directed to adults. The other disadvantage I could find is, as other teachers that have used the website claim, that comments seems not to be regulated, leaving the instance for people to write whatever they want on other people's novels. This can be a problem since students could receive harsh or inappropriate comments from people outside classroom context.
So, to sum up, Wattpad is a website that writers from all ages can create their novels about any topic, having the possibility to read other people's creations and to share their own publicly and have a chance to be recognized and earn income by them. Teachers may make use of the website as it's fairly easy to use and manage for them and students, just be aware of the adult content of the site if you're teaching young students. Once again, thanks for reading and remember to follow the blog to stay updated.
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