Blogging and Language Teaching

As a reasonable continuation of my last post I would like to speak about blogging, weblogs and of course about its role in foreign language learning and teaching. A blog is a personal website that contains some content which is organized like a journal or a diary. Blogs may be personal, professional, educational etc. Some educational blogs are for example http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/, http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/learning-the-language/ etc. So, it can be easily inferred that blogs first of all are very useful and effective for self-education and self-development. Blogging may also be useful for those who have plenty of interesting ideas or thoughts and who need to share it with others. And this function of sharing ideas makes blogs very useful in classrooms, especially in foreign language classrooms. Very often we require from our students to express their ideas and share it with their mates and for this purpose blog writing is an additional tool that EFL teachers may use to make classes more interactive and creative.

Blogs are also very useful for developing students’ reading and writing skills and increasing their ability to think critically because blogs provide place for commenting posts, and everyone can easily write his/her opinion about every single post. All these factors are very little arguments supporting the usefulness of blogs in the classroom. That’s why I would like to mention the results of an article, which proves once again the effectiveness of blogging in classrooms. Fellner T. and Apple M. in their article “Developing Writing Fluency and Lexical Complexity with Blogs” discuss the results of a research conducted with 21 students. The results of the study showed improvements in writing fluency as well as increase in the number of words that participants used in their blogs. The research also showed that blog writing provided students with more opportunities for meaningful negotiation through commenting each other’s posts. This interactive aspect appeared one of the most interesting aspects for students.

Blogs are also attractive for students because it is another opportunity for them to deal with the computer. And this may make them feel more serious people who use the computer not only for playing or chatting, but really for working. So, let’s use blogging in our classes and make our students work with pleasure. 

Useful links:

http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2009/04/blogs-in-education.html