3.3 The advantages and challenges of using blog in efl writing class

The goal of this research is not to measure or compare data, but to understand more about blogs whether it could be an appropriate tool that EFL learners can use to develop their writing skill or not. What challenges teachers faced with when they use blog? In order to do this, the following research question was established: What are advantages and challenges of blogging in an EFL writing class?

The objectives of this research:

1. To study Kazakh students’ attitude about using blogs for the development of writing skill

2. To specify how to use blog in EFL writing classes.

3. What challenges teachers faced with it when they use blog.

4. What type of activities can be done through using blog?

I gather data through interviewing with the EFL teachers who use blog for more than two year in their writing classes and also through questionnaire which is given to the students with aimed of representing their judgments about blogging experience. Since the pedagogical use of blog is not common yet in Iran, I have to interview with EFL teachers who use blog around the world. For finding these teachers I use edublog which is specifically designed for teachers and their students to use. I ask edublog administer team to introduce me the blogs which are for EFL teacher and they introduce me 6 blogs. In addition of edublog, I also interview with the EFL teachers who are member of teacher.02, classroom.02 and EFL.02 which are specifically design for teachers and researchers who use technology in education. These interviews are conducted through sending questions to their weblog and email and also on-line chatting with them [42, p.30].

Students who participants in this research are undergraduate students of TEFL they use blog for one semester. They are asked to answer the questionnaire which includes questions about their attitude toward writing and using of blog. They should rate their agreement on the scale (1 = strongly disagree, 2 = disagree, 3 = not sure, 4 = agree 5 = strongly agree).

The number of students who have blog was 25, and I send the questionnaire link to their email address and ask them to answer the questions based on their own experience. Students must answer all of the questions.

Advantages. The following items are advantages of using blog mentioned by EFL teachers as the advantages of blog according to their experience:

Fluency and accuracy in writing: based on teachers experience the majority of learners will write more carefully if they know that they are going to publish their works online for authentic readers who may comment on their post. Students also notice the language they use, so indirectly, they develop an awareness of accuracy too. Meanwhile, the posts published by students contained a few spelling mistakes due to using word processor.

Collaboration: collaboration is expanded through comment and dissuasion on board. Through blog students can interact, it provides a collaborative learning environment in which students can peer edit others’ posts. Students should be encouraged to comment their classmate’s posts, which can also be shared by other classmates. EFL teachers believe that collaboration and sharing foster learning.

Social learning: it extends students’ learning environment; students find information beyond the confinement of their classroom, textbook, teacher environment and can also use their writing skill to interact with each other or native speakers. And in addition it gives students a voice and allows them to listen to other voices.

Effective role in writing: blogging provide more training in writing, develops conceptual thinking, increase interest in learning for more vocabulary, improve the revision of the mistakes, and help students to learn grammar better. Students try to do their best to have influence on their audience it could also help students to discover their own style on writing for further school works.

Authenticity: one of interviewee told me” a good EFL writing activity is the one which provide authentic audience, authentic task (learners write about their life experiences) and help learners become autonomous in language learning and, blogging can motivated them to continue writing, and I can argue here that by making blogging part of my EFL curriculum I have achieved all of these. There is no EFL textbook, or any teaching activity or material that has these characteristics.”

Sharing idea: it can be used as a tool for all students to read their friends’ writing learn from each other and also students’ written works are much more accessible. 

Real communication: students can write comments about their classmate writing and in this way it becomes like real communication. In real communication, learners become much better at choosing words, using grammar that is more accurate, and organizing their ideas and thoughts carefully.

Increase sense of responsibility and self-improvement: writing on blog increase sense of responsibility about what, why and how students are going to share content with others. In addition, blogger will never know what kind of comments he gone get and how he will respond to that and this made they become careful during all process of writing and develop as competent writers. 

Motivate: having some people read and comment gives students a purpose and motivation and as a result made students enjoy writing.

Can be written by language learners of all proficiencies: based on my interview data the majority of ESL/EFL teachers believe that it is possible to use blog from beginning, however teachers believe that younger students must first of all learn to write with pencil and paper, so at the lower school level, teachers have students draft with pencil and paper and then check their works and have them sometimes do a second draft. Then the students are able to type in on their blog. In this way students become familiar with blog from early stages.

Peer-reviewing: blog provide an environment for students to getting together to read, comment on, and recommend improvements on each other’s works. Without peer feedback students do not how to improve in their writing. Peer-reviewing is a good way to become a better writer because it provides experience in looking critically at writing. Students learn how to provide realistic comment and most of their comments are direct.

Online portfolio: it is one the helpful features of blog which aware learners from their development over time, it represent line of development in chronological order. Online portfolio provides opportunities for the teachers to observe students’ progress and difficulties while they are blogging.

Challenges. The following items are challenges which EFL teachers faced with them when they use blog in their writing class:

Students’ demotivation due to lack of interest: the interviewee believe that motivation is very important factor about the efficiency of blogging. If learners are required to write on their blogs but the topic is not interesting for them or they do not have anything to say, they will only write the minimum and it may not be relevant or useful. Researcher asked his students what they liked best about the blog assignments, and one of the main responses was that the students had the freedom to choose their own topics and express their personal views. So educators must be careful about the topic they select for blogging.

Internet access: sometime students cannot access to Internet, or Internet’s bandwidth may be slow which is as a result, couldn't carry out their tasks. This challenge is also mentioned by students.

Inappropriate feedback: Sometimes students’ comments for their classmates’ blog is not helpful or even discouraging. In addition, not all of the students are able to provide effective feedback they should consider both content and form. Based on some researchers’ viewpoint students need to learner how to put comment and provide feedback. One of the teacher told me that in her small classes she put a hole class analyze the blog post of one classmate, so that they can be more involved in working together in a cooperative way and that one student, could receive a more fundamental comments. Of course I believe that this method can only be effective in small classes.

Correcting students’ error: To what extent should students’ error be corrected? This is very controversial issue among teachers. Some of them said that it is better to just correct small errors and would never correct every single error, and about repeated errors explicit and direct feedback should be provided with the students in order to makes them more self-aware the next time they write a post on a blog. Some other teachers believe that they need to decide the level of supervision at the begging and their main job was not to correct the students’ errors but to get them writing frequently and comfortably. However, these teachers would use blog as a chance to discuss certain recurring errors. However, there is no doubt that students get a lot out of blogging when they receive comments.

Workload: monitoring students' posts efficiently isn't easy because teacher need to read every single blog and highlight mistakes. It is time consuming and workload can increase for both teacher and students when blog is used outside of class time especially in large classes.

Plagiarism: I asked interviewee whether blogging might encourage students to plagiarism which is quite possible within web 2.0 free access resources. The majority of them believe that it’s very difficult to say whether blogging encourages plagiarism or not because if students want to plagiarize, they'll do it, no matter what approach teachers use. Today with the use of internet it's so easy for students to copy and paste somebody else's work. So teachers have to be very alert and check whether students produce original work or not. Rules can be set with regard to the task set by the teacher and if there is the slightest indication that the student has copied the work, the teacher should then decide what action to take.

However one of them told me that: “maybe it's not so simple or tempting some of students, depending on the subject on a blog or depending on their capability to use and recreate (even impropriety) content from other original sources.” 

The selection of appropriate of topic: the topic of writing must be based on students’ interest and need or personal experience. Students must have something to say.

Distraction: usually students are distracted by technology. Distraction in using technology is really important issue. One of the teacher who use blog for more than three years believe that if students feel that technology is only being used as a tool for fun and entertainment, it will cause an distraction them. If students are being engaged in learning through using technology it can be much more effective.

Make students feel involved: from the beginning teacher must explain about the responsibilities of learners (such as Responding to classmates’ comments, and providing effective comments for their friends’ blog). Students’ response

Students’ answers to scale questionnaire on scale 1 to 5:

1. Strongly disagree,

2. Disagree,

3. Not sure,

4. Agree,

5. Strongly agree.

In the following table the frequency of their responses is presented.

Item on the questionnaire	Frequency Strongly disagree	Frequency disagree	Frequency not sure	Frequency agree	Frequency strongly agree
1.Like others read what I have written in English	20.57%	0.00%	08.00%	57.14%	14.29%
2. I am afraid of writing essays in English when I know they will be evaluated by my classmate.	42.86%	31.65%	0.00%	25.49%	0.00%
3 Enjoy discussing my English writing with others	0.00%	0.00%	16.67%	50.00%	33.33%
4. writing on the blog is time consuming	0.00%	01.08%	03.79%	10.13%	85.00%
5. feel confident in my ability to clearly express my ideas in written English	0.00%	03.73%	16.67%	43.87%	35.73%
6. Being unable to clearly write down my ideas in English.	50.67%	17.99%	16.00%	9.41%	5.93%
7. Blogging helps me improve my writing.	66.67%	18.67%	09.12%	05.54%	0.00%
8. Blogging changes my attitude towards writing in English.	20.17%	65.33%	8.67%	03.83%	02.00%
9. continuing to use my blog in the future:	86.52%	8.85%	01.21%	03.42%	0.00%
10. Blog is a useful tool for you to share your ideas	83.33%	11.25%	05.42%	0.00%	0.00%
11. It is a good idea to use blog in English class (writing class)?	23.00%	28.71%	40.72%	5.48%	02.09%

As you can see the majority of students do not believe that blogging have an effective role on the development of their writing skill. They do not enjoy this activity because they believe that it is time consuming activity. They do not believe that blog is an appropriate tool to share their opinion and ideas. However 57.14% of them like to have their friends read what they have written in English. And also 50.00% believe that discussing their language knowledge with others is an enjoyable experience. On the other hand 85.00% of them believe that writing on the blog is time consuming activity. And also 66.67% of them believe that blogging doesn’t help them improve on their writing skill and. With this regard 65.33% of them declare that blogging doesn’t change their attitude toward writing skill. 83.33% of them do not consider blog as a useful tool for to share ideas with others in the cyberspace.

When I examined their posts on the blogs, I found that the qualities of their writing do not increase. One of its reasons may be due to the fact they do not enjoy blogging. And they do blogging only for their final grade that’s why they provide blog within last weeks of the semester. The results of questionnaire reveal that 86% of the students stopped blogging when the semester was over and they prefer to use other social network such as Facebook for practicing writing.

An increasing interest to using blog for pedagogical purposes suggests its application in teaching and learning English. Classroom blogs can have a positive impact on struggling learners’ written communication of ideas and motivate them to write. Although I believe that using blog in EFL classes is really important, a lot of work needs to be done in order to effectively use blogs in the classroom. The context of teaching is different and there is no one formula for all the teachers; as a result using blog should be customized to the needs of the program, pedagogical design, the interest of students and proficiency level. It is essential for the teachers who want to use blog for pedagogical purposes to explain the purpose of the blogging to the students at the beginning of semester, so students understand the expectations and how the blogs are to be used. And also students need to learn how to give effective feedback to each other. Teachers must use this tool in the way that meets students’ need and interest. In this research blogging wasn’t interesting for students and they prefer to use other social network such as Facebook. The results of this research confirm that in application of technology for pedagogical purposes we should consider students interest.

Unfortunately, using of blogs as a learning tool is not common yet in Iranian EFL classrooms. Teachers are not much familiar with it, which can be an obstacle for its application in educational activities. And students do not enjoy blogging. When blog is used in English classes, it is better to consider students’ free choices of topics for Blogging, plagiarism, and neglect of teacher direct correction and feedback.

Limitations and further research. This study reports the results of students’ perceptions about blogs in only one class in №7 K. Spatayev school-lyceum. In this research, the majority of the students were female, and no comparative study could be done so, the results cannot be generalized. The number of teachers who were interview was small. There are few researches about blogging in EFL and only a handful of EFL teachers are using blogs. Unfortunately, blogs is still strange to some English teachers.

However based on the students’ view they prefer to use other social networks such as Facebook so in further research we can investigate the application of using social network in EFL writing classes and also students and teachers attitude toward using them.