Research in the field of English language as a foreign language (EFL) has been consistently highlighted the need for communicative competence skills among students. Accompanied by the validated positive impact of technologies on students’ skills’, this study aims to explore the strategies used by EFL students in enhancing their communicative competence using digital platforms and identify the factors of developing communicative competence using digital platforms (linguistic factors, environmental factors, psychological factors, and university-related factors). The mixed-method research design was utilized to obtain data from Iraqi undergraduate EFL students. The study was conducted in the Iraqi University in Baghdad Iraq. EFL undergraduate students from the English department from the second-year grade constituted the population of the study. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 EFL students to explore students’ usage of digital platforms to enhance communicative competence. A convenient sampling technique was used to select the students. The data from the interviews were analysed thematically using QSR NVivo software. Also, a survey questionnaire was demonstrated to the sample of the study to identify the challenges of development. 150 EFL students participated in the study sampled using the proportional sampling method. SPSS software was also used to analyse the data. The findings showed that students used digital platforms to develop grammar accuracy, pronunciation, vocabulary, cohesion and coherence, punctuation, and spelling. On the other hand, the challenging factors identified are grouped in four categories which are linguistic factors, environmental factors, psychological factors, an university-related factors. The findings of the study offer new insight for future directions research and recommendations to the university management as these findings could be the cornerstones of the planning for successful implementation of digital platforms in teaching and learning English in general and communicative competence in specific.
Challenges of Developing Communicative Competence among Iraqi EFL Undergraduate Student
Challenges
communicative competence
language learning
language teaching
Iraqi students.
Publication Date
Sat Oct 01 2016
Journal Name
Journal Of Theoretical And Applied Information Technology
Factors affecting global virtual teams’ performance in software projects
Today the trend is to perform software development work via distributed geographical area among team
individual or even as an organization. However
due to the global market and international presence of many companies
there is a need to implement a global virtual teams. The global virtual team members are gradually engaged in globalized business environments across space
time and organizational boundaries via information and communication technologies. A global virtual team relies on communication
collaboration
and information exchange are the most important criteria in global virtual teams’ operations. The purpose of this paper is to answer two research questions. The first research question is to identify the factors affecting global virtual teams’ performance. A systematic literature review was conducted to answer the first research question. The second research question is on what the rank of the factor affecting the global virtual teams’ performance according to their level of effect on global virtual teams’ performance. Online survey was conducted within 103 developers and IT managers from eight IT companies to answer the second research question. The Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS 22) was used to analyze the collected data. In this study
we investigated factors that affect global virtual teams’ performance
factors considered include cultural differences
language problems
time-zone differences
team size
technical problems
lack of trust
lack of sufficient training
and ICT problems. Also the findings indicated that lack of sufficient training is the highest level of effect on global virtual teams’ performance. On the other hand
team size is the lowest level of effect on global virtual teams’ performance. © 2005 - 2016 JATIT & LLS. All rights reserved.
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