Abstract:

Undergraduate courses in formative research are offered in the Program of Bachelor´s Degree in Spanish and English languages. (Licenciatura en Lengua Castellana e Inglés.) During the years 2015 and 2016, the authors of this work taught them with little use of new technologies. Consequently, an investigation is designed for the new cycle (2017-2019) with the purpose of making a pedagogical use of ICT to offer a better development of investigative competences. The experience is developed in two class groups. In both cases, problems must be posed, objectives determined, hypothesis or scientific questions formulated, information must be collected and synthesized, diagnosis must be given, proposals need to be designed, and the results discussed. All these steps are executed with a strong preparation in research methodology. In addition, in one group they deal with issues concerning the teaching of Spanish as a foreign language, and in the other the construction of alternative pedagogical proposals and the theoretical assumptions of critical pedagogy. The methodology used is action research. As a result, a pedagogical strategy is implemented which incorporates and evaluates various computer resources to the research process carried out by the students: Brightspace (mailbox, forums, rubrics and checklist); Office 365 Platform (Microsoft Teams, Yammer, Microsoft Forms); Turnitin, Atlas Ti. The integration of these tools benefits teamwork, criticism and self-criticism through the various forms of evaluation, academic integrity avoiding plagiarism, and the application of software to qualitative research. At the same time, students are trained in the pedagogical use of new technologies for their subsequent performance.

Keywords:

Research skills, action research, formative research, ICT.