Blog as a Social Interaction

Is that too assertive to say that in actual every one is a blogger? Maybe not so much if we believe blogging is sharing and communicating. We share pictures, thoughts and events with our readers/friends in all the social media networks, and we comment on their sharing and their posts, which forms communication between us and others. This broader sense of blogging leads me to a belief that blogs are the sites for people to negotiate their social identities through establishing their writer’s voice. If this belief is acceptable in a language learning classroom, how we, language teachers and educators, make full use of the sites and benefit our students’ learning is worth exploring.

First, I would encourage my students to start their own blogs which would have distinctive features representing their own personality, interest or pursuit. This may sound like cliché because everyone’s blogs are unique and distinctive, but, in fact, if the bloggers have to use a second language to present themselves and communicate with each other, things could be very different. With motivation for successful presentation of themselves, L2 bloggers would be more actively involved in their L2 learning and using. For example, writing will be one of the most crucial skills the learners need in their blog sharing and commenting. Thus to make their blogs interesting to the readers, the learners will thrive to apply what they have learned or to find out a better/proper way to make themselves clear and understandable. Actual learning happens when the learners use the language and when they use the resource they have to acquire new knowledge and apply the knowledge to actual use.

To encourage the students to present their personalities, their perspectives and their interest, to friends or new audiences, we also need to help the students to develop other strategies when the students don’t have enough language proficiency. For example, they can add photos, pictures or video clips as demonstrations of their ideas. They can be as creative as they can be to achieve the communication goals in their blogs. In this sense, the students will deploy both verbal and non-verbal resources to interact with the readers of their blogs, which is absolutely not unusual in the actual language use. Thus, helping our learners to develop and use such strategies to convey ideas in L2 is also building up the learners’ communication skills in a real social context(Standard– ESL.I.5-8.4).