DEVELOPING WRITING SKILLS VIA BLOGS

Abstract

The main goal of English language teaching (ELT) is to develop learners’ skills to communicate with other people in real world situations and to express themselves in English (Brown, 1987; Oxford, 1990; Yang and Chen, 2007) (quoted in Fageeh 2011, p.1). According to Pinkman (2005) blogs can provide interesting, authentic and communicative resources that can serve a variety of purposes in language classroom and they can also be used to encourage interaction among students and between teachers and students (Yang, 2009). In this study, the participants were 1st year university students (n=103) who created their group blogs in order to share their ideas during their oral communication classes. Students interacted with their peers via blogs simply by reading and commenting on each other’s blog posts. The data was collected from the blog entries and a questionnaire administered at the end of the project in order to understand the perceptions of students on effectiveness of using blogs in developing their writing and critical thinking skills. It is hoped that the findings of this study provides some food for discussion on a number of pedagogical and theoretical issues.