THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF WORDS: A COMPUTER-BASED LEARNING EXPERIENCE

This article reports on an action research project that took place as part of two regular and compulsory courses in the 3rd year of English Studies at Alcala University, developed in the Blackboard learning system, that is, a computer-mediated format. The steps of the project were the following: Firstly, the integration of computerized tools in the curriculum of the two university subjects. Secondly, the implementation of this learning experience was based on a corpus of selected texts which were annotated to help and guide students in their work (the World of Texts); and a database used by students to deal with lexical analysis and to record their findings and their knowledge about lexical items from the texts compiled (the Web of Words). By integrating ICT in the teaching process, we expected to foster students' autonomy and motivation as well as to improve their lexical and semantic competence. The research results suggest that, in the first place, the computer-mediated format increased students' motivation and encouraged autonomy in the learning process; in addition, it contributed to a better understanding of both subjects.