Blogging is a nifty tool that can be used in a variety of ways in the ESL classroom. As a teacher, there is no way to ensure that your students will use English when they step out of your classroom. However, it is very likely that your students will use the internet to communicate with others, look up information, or just browse the web at some point throughout the day. Creating blog exercises is a good way to bridge the gap between what happens in the classroom and the students' daily lives.
Blogging gives students a sense of what writing in the L2 looks like outside of a textbook. This is a useful tool across all skill levels, but especially advantageous for intermediate and advanced classes. Interacting with other students online will allow students to communicate with each other on a more personal level, allowing them to have more meaningful conversation.
In any classroom, it is important to acknowledge different learning styles, as well as individual strengths and weaknesses of your students. For instance, some students may find speaking tasks intimidating, while others may love them. One student might learn best through audio stimuli while another relies on visuals. As teachers we know that giving students access to a variety of stimuli is very important. With that being said, blogs can be used to share articles, photos, videos, audio clips, etc.
Overall, blogging is a refreshing change of pace. Blogs are an alternative way to express one's creative side, and I plan on incorporating them into my future classroom!
Performance Indicators:
- ESL.C.9-12.4.1.1: Students use a variety of oral, print, and electronic forms for social communication and for writing to or for self, applying the conventions of social writing.
- ESL.C.9-12.1.1.2: Students read, gather, view, listen to, organize, discuss, interpret, and analyze information related to academic content areas from various sources.
Thank you for your post Virginia. You hit the nail on the head with your discussion on learning styles. This is so vital to know and implement as educators of L2 learners, as not every student learns the same. I share the same viewpoint that blogging is a means of appealing to the varied learning styles - visual, aural, verbal, logical, etc. Students will tend to be more engaged if a teacher understands this complexity of the learning process and incorporating tools such as blogs is a great step.
ReplyDeleteStudents are far more likely to utilize something that is easy and fun so integrating computers and technology with their lessons helps to mitigate some of the angst of getting them to write and do some of the other tasks we need them to do in the L2 classroom. Sharing your pictures with your readers is great and it can also be another bridge to your students. As long as they are appropriate, students love to see their teachers as "real" people. It is also good because you never know if there is a student out there who will bond with you over a shared interest and take more of a liking to your class because of it. It is amazing how much harder they will try to be engaged in class if they know you have a common interest.
ReplyDeleteGreat post, Virginia! As a teacher, we need to provide our students with access to "a variety of stimuli" (quote from you :D). Indeed! Adding to your great point, here is my perspective of why it's so important to do so. In my EFL teaching experience, due to lack of connection between language learning and real life outside classroom, most often, students found English is not 'dry' and 'dead'. Blogging is a great way of connecting students' opinions, interest, life events, etc. to language learning. Students can utilize whatever resources, verbal and nonverbal, they have to communicate with their blog audiences, just like what they would do in their first language. In this process, audio and visual stimuli not only enhance individual learning, but also bring 'life' to the foreign language and thus lead to natural learning.
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