Technology-mediated Writing Tasks in the Online English Classroom: Focus on Form via Synchronous Videoconferencing.

Italy was the first country in the European Union to adopt a nationwide lockdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and students and teachers were significantly affected. This chapter reports on a case study in an Italian secondary school that explores the use of technology-mediated language tasks to develop competence in past simple and past continuous tenses in a second language (L2). The English language class took place online using the Google Meet video conferencing tool. The participants were 24 English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students from a lower secondary school in Milan who completed a module on narrative tenses during six one-hour lessons. The study aimed to measure the impact on student’s learning of an explicit focus on form at the pre-task stage, and followed a mixed-methods approach. Both pre- and post-test data were collected alongside students’ perceptions of technology-mediated language writing tasks via an online questionnaire that learners completed at the end of the module. Findings suggest that learners reached the expected linguistic goals in the use of narrative tenses; students also reported a perceived improvement in their language competence, showing positive attitudes towards the task type and modality. This study sheds light on the use of focus on form activities at the pre-task stage and contributes to research on how technology-mediated task-based learning can be undertaken in a challenging online EFL school context.