Blogs creates new ways of ESL learning
Since I entered in college, I got permission that I could use computer to do my homework, I still remember how excited I was. However, I didn’t know who to use the resources online appropriately and how to cooperate my work and electronic devices together, I spent plenty of time looking for the information that I needed, still sometimes, it lacked reliability and it cost a lot of time. Every new ways of trying takes time, I was on the way to manipulate the electronic resources well. Now I’m a graduate student, and blogs, wikis, discussion board, electronic dictionary, software for learning new language, Youtube, Facebook, and so forth are part of my life. As a teacher in the future, I believe using web tools is not only necessary in classroom, but also very beneficial for teachers.
Here are some ways that I came up with that ESL teacher can use blogs:
1. Build a platform for teacher and students communication.
TESOL Standard1: English language learners communicate for social, intercultural, and instructional purposes within the school setting.
Language Domain: Reading and writing.
Berners-Lee says, “was make it a collaborative medium, a place where we [could] all meet and read and write” (as cited in Carvin, 2005) One important value for create a blog for teacher is building a platform which students and teachers could communicate, and the main ways of communication are reading, writing. Always teacher firstly write a blog to express personal ideas, comments or questions, than students read it, students give comments or raise questions in accordance to the blog content. Through this method, the communication platform is built, it could be very collaborate and interactive. I had a teacher who is a very experienced professor in college, he graduated from Yale, and he is the only American teacher who teaches western culture in my college in China. However, his personality made us feel not that easy-going until he introduce his blog to us. Since that, we found he is such an interesting person, he loves teaching, reading, travel, and photography, and the blog provide us a very efficient way to communicate. Thus I believe it also benefits the professor a lot, at least, students would like to talk to him and answer his questions in class from that. So, using blogs well is a win-win situation for both students and teachers.
2. Expand classroom, make the learning content more explicit and enjoyable.
TESOL Standard2: English language learners communicate information, ideas, and concepts necessary for academic success in the area of language arts.
Language domain: Listening.
The class time are often not enough for practice language listening. And intensive is very important for improving listening ability, students have CDs, tapes to practice listening, however no one can compare to the update speed as Internet does. Online resources provided millions of listening practice, and students may not be able to select the best resources for their language level. By blogs, teacher can accommodate the insufficient content in class, selective source would be beneficial to students, and they can play as much as they want, pause where they can not understand so easily. Of course, it won’t spend one second in class.
3. Easily collect data and analyze the language learning states.
TESOL Standard5: English language learners communicate information, ideas, and concepts necessary for academic success in the area of social studies.
Language domain: speaking.
Creating an audio thread and upload on blog is more easily to control and deliver than writing a CD or tape. ESL teacher can create a blog which has some requests of a topic, it could be some topics from TOEFL test. Then if students are interested in it, they can create an audio clip and upload on blog. I think they would like to, because they have less opportunity to practice speaking, I mean the speaking as a test, so they would value teacher’s feedback. For teacher, they have first-hand data from students, the data is very useful for analyzing students’ speaking level, looking for the weakness. The data analysis reflects on teaching content. Why not do that, another win-win!
