Exploiting Blogs in the ESL Classroom

An increasing number of public and private institutions of higher learning in Malaysia are offering courses using the blended approach, where knowledge delivery is done via face-to-face classes and online modes to enable students to complete assignments and projects. The Internet and online learning tools facilitate to incorporate courses, syllabi, and teaching materials to make knowledge delivery and information sharing more challenging, meaningful and interesting. This paper discusses how blogs have been utilized as a platform for interactions in the language classroom. The study investigated how students used the blog to practise their communication and writing skills, and in what way blogging have benefited them. Attempts were made to answer these questions through reviewing students’ responses about commencing and sharing knowledge via blogs. The paper also presents some creative steps shared by students in exploiting their blogs during their language course.

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