Readings #3 (1. Soares, 2. Levy-Stockwell, Chapter 8)

*BLACKBOARD - Soares, D. d.A. (2008). Understanding class blogs as a tool for language development. Language Teaching Research, 12(4), 517–533.

What challenges did Soares face when using blogs with her ESL students, and what lessons did she learn? How does she feel about using blogs with students in the future?

One of the challenges she describes (in various ways) is the challenge of structuring and presenting blogging in such a way as to make the activity appealing (and thus motivating) for her teenage students.

Soares gave her students assignments which involved posting short writings to the class blog, and also responding to their classmates’ postings. However, she initially saw very little willingness on the part of the students to participate.

She then gave her students a series of surveys to find out their views on blogging as an activity, and she specifically wanted to find out why most of them were apparently not motivated enough to post and respond regularly. Among the problems that her students reported were not having enough time, or having computer-related problems such as difficulties logging in.

She eventually decided to try devoting more time during class to allow the students to contribute to the class blog in small groups. Doing it this way, she discovered, resulted in generating a lot more enthusiasm from the students. Evidently, most of them probably felt that contributing to the blog on their own, outside of class, was just too boring or too difficult. Soares found that doing it together in class as a group activity was much more interesting and fun for her students.

Soares added links to other class blogs in the sidebar, and asked her students to leave comments on those outside blogs, but she found that getting her students to actually do it was hard because they didn’t think it was interesting. They were willing, however, to leave comments on their classmates writings.

Among the lessons she learned was that her students were not as comfortable using computers and the internet as she had assumed. She admits that they would have benefitted from more hands-on guidance in the computer lab from the beginning.

Overall, I think she learned some good lessons about how best to structure and present blogging to her students in the future. The main lesson was to make it more of a in-class group activity, and not to expect the students (at that age) to put in a lot of time on it outside of class as an individual, ‘homework’ kind of assignment.

LEVY – Ch. 8. Technology

Levy describes several types of technologies Choose one of them and describe how you might want to use it (or have used it), and discuss some of considerations that need to be taken when using this technology with ESL students

A lot of new technology is discussed in this chapter. While some of it does sound very promising, I feel that it’s hard for me to have much of an opinion on the specific details, because I just don’t have enough experience in the field.

Of all of the types of technology that are taken up in the discussion, I suppose the one that I can see as potentially having a big impact on learning is the various ways of using the internet for video-conferencing.

Allowing language students be able to interact with native speakers in real time, I think, would be a great way of giving them a little more motivation to practice and improve their speaking and listening abilities. For ESL teachers teaching in English-speaking countries, it might also be something to try, but I think it would be especially useful for EFL teachers in non-English speaking countries, where EFL students might not often have to react and respond to someone other than their own teacher. In many such environments, EFL students often have a tendency to think that speaking and listening is not very important, compared with reading and writing. I think conferencing could make language learning seem more “real” and more fun for them, and also more useful in a real-world sort of way. One big challenge that EFL teachers often have is making their students feel that English is useful to them in more ways than simply helping them pass standardized tests or getting a good score on university entrance tests.

Hopefully, this type of conferencing will become faster and easier to use in the future, and more schools will have the hardware necessary to make it easy to use as a whole-class activity.

It also has good potential as a way for students (individually or in small groups) to interact with other ELLs, or with native speakers far away. If done right, I think it would be a great way to do some kind of reciprocal language practice. For example, a class of EFL students in China could do conferencing with a class of students learning Chinese in the U.S.