Uso de WhatsApp y el aprendizaje colaborativo en el alumnado de ELE: caso de un grupo WhatsApp de estudiantes cameruneses.

Abstract

New information and communication technologies (NICTs) have brought about a major change in the way students learn and interact. Autonomous and collaborative learning no longer takes place only in physical learning spaces (study rooms, libraries, etc.), but also online. All students nowadays have one or more chat groups on WhatsApp created by themselves for leisure, informative, curricular or educational purposes. Thus, the advent of NICTs has significantly boosted collaborative learning. In this research, we are interested in the use of WhatsApp as a tool for the creation of learning groups by Cameroonian learners of Spanish as a foreign language. For this purpose, we have selected as a corpus a WhatsApp group called Práctica ESPA ENS Camerún, created and self-managed by the students themselves and consisting of 128 members. Our aim is to analyse the interactions in this forum in order to determine the educational practices and types of resources mobilised by the students in it. We propose to answer two questions: what are the discursive and pedagogical characteristics or particularities of the conversations in the group under study? What are the functions of the uses they make of this virtual learning environment (VLE)? From the results obtained in this study, it can be seen that in the WhatsApp forum under analysis, there are learning situations of different kinds that contribute to the collaborative development of the members' communicative, informational, didactic and (psycho)pedagogical competences.