Blogging and ELT???
In the realm of English Language Teaching, blogging holds significant importance as it provides language learners with a dynamic platform to enhance their language skills in authentic, real-world contexts. Blogs function as a community, greatly facilitating students' learning experiences. Specifically, engaging in regular writing tasks aids students in refining not only their language abilities but also their critical thinking and communication skills. Blogging enables students to express ideas, share experiences, and interact with peers, thereby fostering their interpersonal skills. Furthermore, it cultivates a sense of community by encouraging interactive learning through comments on each other's posts. Additionally, I believe that blogging has the potential to promote independence by empowering students to take control of their own language-learning journey.
In the article from the British Council, Aaron Campbell (2003) has outlined three types of blogs for use with language classes which are the Tutor Blog, the Class Blog, and the Learner Blog. Basically, The Tutor Blog functions as a notice board that informs students about assignments and upcoming deadlines, and the interaction of this type of blog is often overlooked. The Class Blog places a great emphasis on interaction between teachers and students and students themselves. Members are encouraged to interact with others by commenting on each other posts and expressing their viewpoints. Finally, for the last type, the Learner Blog caters to a personal cyberspace where students can establish their own blogs and share their own pieces of writing. As an IELTS teacher, I always aim to develop all four skills for the students and I am passionate about creating a holistic academic platform in which the students can immerse themselves in English in a fun and relaxing way. Therefore, The Class blog would be the most suitable. My blog can be used to share useful information like techniques to improve listening skills, top 6 movies to enhance your lexical range, and so on. Besides, the students can also make contributions to my blog about anything that interests them to share with their peers in the comment section below.
In the sharing
session, we were divided into different breakout Zoom and took turns to share
about the process by which our blogs were created. Besides, we also helped
other team members to clarify their confusion about blogs and to work out some
technical obstacles they had encountered.
References :
1. Graham Stanley, British Council, Barcelona Blogging for ELT
No comments:
Post a Comment