Teaching Reading and Writing through a Web-Based Communicative Medium: Weblog

Abstract

With the advent of push-button publishing in the field of ICT, in the shape of weblog, language teachers now have a new way to entice students to communicate through their reading and writing. Web blogging started fairly in 1990, and refers to websites that are continuously updated (Blood,2000). According to Richardson (2004) language teachers can subscribe to their students linguistic abilities especially in writing and readingThis paper discusses how weblogs develop writing, reading and communication skills. The positive and negative potential of weblog for language teacher is discussed, the use of weblogs in a writing class for non-native English speakers in the second year of university study is demonstrated and the feedback from these students is considered. This quasi-experimental study was conducted on 40 non-native English speakers of upper-intermediate level. They were university students in two classes at the Kashan University of Medical Sciences. At the end of the course, but before they had received their final grades, the students were given two questionnaires (multiple-choice and explanatory) to assess the effectiveness of this assignment.The vast majority of students preferred English writing the weblog to the more traditional ways. Most of them believed that weblog can improve English and a few of them said that they would definitely continue using wblog. The findings seem to confirm that despite generally having no prior experience of web design, most of the students enjoyed the assignment, believed that it was helping the improvement of their English and that it assisted them in producing good work.Blog assisted language learning (BALL) not only provides teachers with an exciting new way to approach communicative language learning, it also, despite facing challenges, gives the students a new reason to enjoy reading and writing.