USING BLOGS FOR ENGLISH WRITING
Recent innovations such as weblogs offer learning opportunities online (Godwin, 2003). Blogs
are easily linked and cross-linked to create larger on-line communities. Language learners can
use a personal blog as an electronic portfolio that shows development over time. By publishing
the blog online, the student has the opportunity of writing for readers beyond their classmates.
Readers in turn can comment on what they have read.
Based on the proposed possibilities for classroom application, one might expect blogs to offer
many reading and writing incentives for English learning and writing because blogging places
emphasis on content, the possibility of speedy feedback, the option of working with both words
and images, and the ability to link one post to another. Scholars who use blogs also say that
because students know they are going to have an audience by publishing their writing on the
Web, they often produce higher quality work than students who write only for the teacher or for
others in the class. Several scholars have reported on how they use blogs to support their
classroom instruction and have found that blogs offer many reading and writing incentives.