Teaching Writing Skills to Students via Blogs

Abstract

The global informatization of society is one of the dominant trends in the development of mankind in the 21st century. Rapid development and spread of modern information and communication technologies in Russia affects the state policy in the field of education. Informatization of education has become one of the priority directions in the Russian education system modernization, aimed at development of methodology, methodological systems, technologies, methods and organizational forms of education to improve the mechanisms of education system management in the modern information society. Integration of Web 2.0 social services into the process of a foreign language teaching also contributes to the development of foreign language communicative competence and the achievement of the main learning objectives. In this paper authors consider using blogs in teaching the writing skills to students: they explore various types of blogs and review their didactic features and methodological function; suggest a list of writing skills developed via blogs; and determine the stages of students’ writing skills development via blogs.