WHAT DOES BLOGGING GENRE IN LANGUAGE TEACHING
First of all, we should describe that what is blog. According to Blogging for ELT article, a blog is a website and it allows users to reflect, share their opinions. Also, users participate in the discussion about various topics in the form of an online journal while readers can comment on posts. Moreover, a blog may display photos, videos, audio etc.
There are three genre blog in language teaching.
First, The Tutor Blog: It is used by teachers of class.
Second, The Class Blog: It is a shared space with teachers and students. They write to main idea and they may make a collaborative discussion by this blog.
Third, The Learner Blog: It gives each student an individual blog but it requires more time and effort from the teacher for set up and moderate. However, it is pretty much rewarding, because students feel free.
How we can use blogs in language teaching classroom: There are many options to use blogging for language teaching classroom. One of them that student can create a blog which is giving encourage to the students’ interest and motivation for the student writing and reading skills also student can be encouraged to post their writing homework on the blog instead of only taking it to the class.
Some activity ideas for blogging: Firstly, you can make some activities for blogging, for examle, you invite a guest teacher to your blog and student ask some question to find the guest identy.
Second, Project work that is shared work with the other country schools.
Third, International link-ups, it contacts educational establishment and students writes about their interest, culture, lives and etc. In my opinion that if the students are interested in writing something, we can teach that they can learn second language by narration-based teaching.We should do group working or individual and we have to aware of their proficiency level. Example, in upper intermediate level, every student can create a story in classroom, or student can complete an unfinished story in classrom.
The lastly idea is photoblog, if you want to create a photo blog there are some tools aveliable to your photo blog, such as Flicky(http://www.flickr.com), Buzznet(http://www.buzznet.com).
All things considered, there can be many reason for creating your own blog, it has some benefit such as, it gives a personal online space to students and they can write about what interest them and they develop learning second language, also they can join a comminity.
If you want to learn more about Blog you can visit the British Council site,(https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/blogging-elt).
Thank you very much for reading it!
Wings of Minerva 