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Using blogs in the languages classroom
Principles of teaching
As blogs can give students access to multimedia resources outside of the classroom, the teacher can enable students to complete tasks at home or help them with revision practice by creating online written or spoken instructions for them to download. In this way, blogs can facilitate distance learning opportunities and cater for a variety of learning styles, allowing young people to choose when and where they want to learn. Likewise, learning can be made more personalised to individual needs and as a result students can become more engaged and feel more independent. This approach moves away from the typical classroom situation of teacher-student and student-student relationships. The learner using blogs is able to take more ownership over how he or she learns best.
Being able to comment on the content of a blog offers students the opportunity:
- to give formal feedback
- to peer assess each other’s work
- to ask for help with homework tasks
Some schools follow the AfL model of Two Stars and a Wish, where students write two positive comments on a piece of work and one suggestion on how it could be improved.
Using blogs can also raise pupil motivation and appeal to boys’ general interest in using technology and girls’ creativity.
Enhancing performance across the skills
Blogs can help to improve all four skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing in the following ways:
Listening
- Teacher or pupil-produced podcasts can be made available via the blog and downloaded with accompanying written materials for additional support
- Podcasts posted on the blog can be designed to offer pronunciation practice, guides to learning vocabulary, grammar explanations, and revision for speaking assessments or examples of students’ spoken work
- Students can transfer audio files from a blog to a mobile device so they can learn on the move and work at their own pace, listening as often as is required
- Using podcasts posted on a blog encourages students to listen actively to their own and others’ work
- Learners can be motivated from hearing their own teacher’s voice or those of their classmates, thereby making a listening activity less threatening and more engaging
Speaking
- Students prepare podcast scripts to be placed on the blog and rehearse individually or in groups
- The recording and editing process can help students to embed key concepts and improve their pronunciation and accuracy at the same time
- By putting the scripts into their own words and writing for a specific audience students’ understanding of the content can deepen
- Shy students can feel less self-conscious as they are not required to speak to someone else face to face and can record themselves privately or publish their recording as a virtual representation of themselves or 'speaking avatar'
- Podcasting for placement on a blog is suitable for all levels and can stretch the higher ability students and promote creativity
Reading
- Students can complete homework or revision tasks outside of the classroom by accessing materials and activities posted by their teacher to the blog
- Students can access authentic posts from foreign language blogs and pick out the main points or read for gist
Writing
- As students know they are writing for a real purpose they feel more motivated and want to raise their standards accordingly
- Students can take more time over their work improve their accuracy
- Peer assessment based on specific success criteria can help students see what they need to do to improve further
- The multimedia nature of blogs can stimulate creative writing work such as storytelling, poems and songs
