BLOGGING

The purpose of this post is to give a brief overview of blogging and its importance mainly relating it to English Language Teaching (ELT)

Thousands of people enter the blogsphere daily. In its early stage, it was called “online journaling,” and some people even called it “web diaries.”

What is a blog?

A blog is a tool (website or part of a website) which can feature editorial commentary, links to other sites, stories, specific topics, genres, personal opinions, news, comments and interaction, photographs, your activities, and more. Anyone can create a blog. Bloggers, people who post blogs, can publish really interesting materials and share information with the general public. It is a webpage that serves as a publicly accessible journal. It organizes posts in a chronological order, meaning the most recent post appears first, at the top. The evolution from website to blog has changed how people communicate nowadays.

Difference between a website and a blog

A website is “serious information” while a blog is “not so serious information.” A website contains facts, figures, articles, and educational material. A blog has the same, but adds a pile of links, talks, and comments. In fact, a blog is a website, but it is more interactive and magical.

Why blog?

A blog can inform and educate the public. For example, people around the world who had no means of expressing opinions publicly now have a chance to do so freely. Blog are giving them a voice they have never had before. Educators and students can now share their teaching and learning experience on blogs so that others can learn from them. There is more educational material accessible than in the past. 

Blogging in English Language Teaching (ELT)

There are three main types of blogging in language teaching:

1. The tutor’s blog, which is only for the teachers to give information about classes, courses and so on. The students are limited to making comments only.

2. The class blog, where both the teachers and students can write and leave comments. It is more collaborative.

3. The learner’s blog, where the students are supposed to setup, moderate, invite classmates and so on. This type of blog requires more time and effort.

Blogging is excellent for ELT purposes because, first of all, it helps students to become somewhat digitally literate, which is vital because in our technologically changing and advancing world, they would most likely be forced to do a lot of web-searching to find information to facilitate their learning process in the target language. There is accessibility to more reading materials, which is one of the best ways to increase students’ level of vocabulary in the second language. It is a good tool to motivate and encourage students to participate more, especially the shy ones, because that stumbling block called “embarrassment” is automatically eradicated, thus, promoting a certain degree of self-confidence. A blog is also a great tool to improve the students creativity because it is fairly friendly, and students can really develop interesting posts, and, creativity is a characteristic that they need to embrace in their language endeavors.

There are many, many more of persuading and interesting reasons of why to use blog for ELT purposes. However, on this occasion, my aim is just to point out a few important ones.

I hope this post made life a bit easier for you.