This article suggests acivities for EFL classes to improve writing through blogging.
Blogging is a great tool for English language classes and it has a number of advantages:
– Blogging rises sense of community in a classroom.
– It involves process writing approach.
– It encourages students to be active outside of the classroom.
– It is an online portfolio of students works.
– It can be described as online journals as peers of students can also read and comment on them.
– Students are exposed to extra reading.
A couple of websites are available to create a personal blog such as WordPress, Wix, Weebly, Medium and Blogger. It doesn’t take more than 15 minutes to set up a blog. You can also find tutorial videos in YouTube. I prefer using WordPress in my classes as it has a great amount of free templates and looks more professional compared to others.
For detailed information about sites for blogging, please click here.
I am a teacher in a school of foreign languages of a state university. That’s why my students are young adults and advanced level groups. There are many ideas or opinions over what to blog and how to organize it. However, you should take your groups’ needs and levels into consideration. Thus, I get my students read the news opinion or analysis from Turkish resources such as TRTWorld and AnadoluAgency and write a reflection or review article over these news.
My instruction is as follows:
Please read the article about the topic and answer the following questions in your review paper.
– What is the article about?
– What are the key factors / points/ issues there?
– Do you agree with that opinion / analysis?
– Why do you agree or Why don’t you agree?
– Conclusion part / What are your final thoughts?
At least 250 words
Another suggestion for blogging is to write a film review and book review. Students enjoy sharing books they read and films they watched. You can also get them to comment on each other’s posts. For example templates, you can analyze my posts over how to write a book review and how to write a film review. Students may take notes of key phrases in bold.
Here is a couple of blogs created by my students:
heropatato.home.blog
beverlyhomehome.wordpress.com
jasonthompson.home.blog
williamspaper.home.blog
leodera.home.blog
dayswithcharles.home.blog
Please do not hesitate to contact me if you require further information and share your ideas about blogging.
