The Effects of Utilizing Smart Phones in Enhancing Students’ English Essay Writing Skills in Pakistan

The objective of this study was to investigate the role of smart phone & PowerPoint in motivating and enhancing students’ English Essay writing skills in Pakistan. Being quasi-experimental in nature, the study adopted mixed method design blending quantitative as well as qualitative approaches for data collection and analysis. The 90 registered intermediate students of the Government M.A.O. College, Lahore and two lecturers participated in the study. All of them were having homogeneous characteristics concerning their age as well as their scores in the first-year English exam. Both experimental and control groups had 45 students each. Three instruments including pre-test/ post-test, questionnaire on motivation and semi-structured interviews were employed in the study. To measure the students’ performance in essay writing skills pre-test and post-test were employed. The quantitative data was analyzed using the SPSS Windows program Version 22 for which independent samples t-test was applied for the inferential statistics. However, for the descriptive part, the qualitative data was analyzed and interpreted based on the emerging themes. The findings from the quantitative data analysis indicated that the experimental group outperformed the control group both in their motivation score as well as the score in writing skills. In addition, the findings from the qualitative data revealed that mobile phones had not only motivated the students but also helped to enhance their writing skills. Findings from the qualitative data support the findings from quantitative data. These findings have strong theoretical, pedagogical and practical implications.