Blogs in Foreign Language Teaching (Individual Entry #5)
What is a blog?
WPMU DEV. What is a Blog? (06.07.2013). Online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjwUHXoi8lM. (Stand: 25.02.2016).
“Blog” is an abbreviated form of the word “web-log” (Dudeney 125). A blog can be described as type of website which is usually arranged in a chronological order from the most recent entry at the top of the main page to older entries and functions as “[…] tools for collaboration, information exchange and reflection […].” (125). A blogger, a person who writes a blog, publishes texts which can be illustrated by means of pictures, videos, etc.
How can blogs be used in foreign language teaching?
There are different uses of blogs in foreign language teaching such as creating teacher blogs, student blogs or reading existing blogs.
Teacher Blogs
Blogs created by teachers can serve as a platform to share and provide materials, instructions and exercises with students. Furthermore, teachers can upload the board content of their lessons and make them available for their students from anywhere at any time. A teacher blog can be similar to a class homepage and be used receptively by the students. Alternatively, a teacher blog could also serve as exposition space for pupils’ works and projects. Appreciating students’ works and presenting them on such an online gallery might motivate students to fully engage with their projects.
Student Blogs
I think there are several purposes for which students could create a blog. First of all, it can be differentiated between a collaborative class blog and an individual student blog.
Collaborative Blogs
Attending literature courses, students can use blogs as kind of digital reading diaries to share and discuss their impressions, analysis and interpretations. Such literature blogs can also be used as a social platform engaging (virtual) interaction between pupils and serve as sort of a virtual book club.
Moreover, summaries of each chapter of a novel written by different groups or individual students can be collected and distributed to create an own class-based shortened version of the novel. In general, working with new media can be very motivating for students. Especially those who are not that interested in literature might gather a different approach towards the topic. Additionally, I think that providing information for other students encourages them in taking greater care of their results and how they present them.
However, blogs are also perfectly suitable for interdisciplinary projects. For instance, I could imagine combining history, political education and foreign language teaching by creating single blog entries from the perspective of different famous politicians on certain political issues. One idea could be that every student embodies a historical character or a contemporary politician and writes statements on a given issue in the target language. Afterwards, the positions could be evaluated.
Blogs also allow students to develop creative writing skills. In the context of project days or workshops they can create their own blog on anything that interests them (sports, food, fashion, etc.) and express themselves in an authentic way in their target language. For younger students many pictures, videos or other multimedia files can be included. In my opinion, also younger students who are not that proficient in their target language yet can write blogs and enjoy expressing themselves in their foreign language.
Besides using blogs in literary studies, interdisciplinary projects or to enhance creative writing processes, they can also be integrated into cultural studies. Since blogs offer an authentic means to communicate with native speakers, exchanging with speakers of the target culture can be very motivating to students as they recognise that foreign language learning enables real communication. Furthermore, it is an awesome experience for language learners, also in the first years of learning a language, to see that what they learned at school is applicable in real life. For instance, two schools which plan an exchange programme can create a blog to introduce their schools and initiate first contact between exchange partners.
This is an example of a blog with different classes around the world participating.
In addition to that, blogs can support collaborative learning. When I did my A-levels, we implemented several wrap-up sessions to repeat important contents. In group work we prepared presentations to repeat and share the most striking concepts. In this case, creating a blog would have been extremely helpful to share information as all students would have had the chance to access the presentations and repeat and practice the content at home at any time. Although summarising and repeating content for A-levels is tough, this would have been more effective and even more fun. Importantly, a blog would have encouraged debates about different issues even more.
Individual Blogs
Individually created blogs can serve as a digital substitute for reading diaries or portfolios which enable students to show their learning processes and personal developed skills by means of uploading pieces of writing, pictures and videos. Compared to an analogue project, e-portfolios offer many different varieties and creative opportunities of expressing one’s own thoughts and development which seems to be more motivating. Due to its multifaceted approach learners can interact with writing, pictures and videos.
Disadvantages
some students might not be able to write a blog because they do not have access to internet at home; technical devices should be provided at school
might be a platform for cyber bullying
data protection
Advantages
fosters reading and writing competence
fosters students’ media literacy
fosters social competence (interaction with other bloggers)
shows learning processes, self-reflection of learning processes
supports long-term learning instead of short-term memory-based learning for exams
not a punctual assessment of students' performance but long-term assessment of the students' progress
students can be creative (in terms of autonomous selected topics or tasks and in terms of visualisation)
students learn self-regulated and self-paced working
Because I was working on this website and created my own blog, too, I can definitely say that it supported my media literacy as I now know how to create a website, embed pictures and text, insert videos etc. Additionally, I dealt with the topics more intensively than I did in other courses. Therefore, I am of the opinion that the advantages overweigh the disadvantages. All in all, I think that blogs can be very effective in foreign language teaching.
Dudeney, Gavin. The Internet and the Language Classroom. 2nd edition. Cambridge UP 2007. Print.
