1. THE EFFECTIVENESS OF BLOG IN AN ENGLISH WRITING CLASS
Since 1998, weblogs (or “blogs”) have gained increasing notice in the cyberspace community, more and more foreign educators have applied this user-friendly technology to classroominstruction and language learning (Campbell, 2003; Johnson, 2004); however, it seems that relatively few English teachers have ever used blogs in an EFL writing class around us. Althoughnot originally created for use in language education, blogs have formidable potentials as a useful tool for the teaching of EFL writing class.
In a short blog posting titled “Do weblogs improve writing?” Bernstein (2004) advocated “Frequent writing improves writing”, “Writing for an audience improves writing”, “Writing that matters improves writing”, and “Writing on a computer improves writing”. However, to EFLlearners, frequent writing may not necessarily improve writing. Nevertheless, it will definitely behelpful if students do not only write frequently but also look up English dictionaries or use Internet to help them express their ideas clearly and correctly. EFL learners’ writings will be more or less influenced by their first language. The improvement of writing will be questioned ifEFL students write English frequently but present their thoughts with the style of their firstlanguage. And some students answer that they will look up an English dictionary or ask someone else when they don’t know how to express their ideas in English. To an EFL learner, it is a critical step to become a successful writer if whenever he is aware that something wrong with his writing, he can effectively find an answer from an English dictionary or Internet.