WEEK 11:
THE USE OF BLOGS IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNING: A STUDY OF STUDENT PERCEPTIONS
A study entitled “The Use of Blogs in English Language Learning: A Study of Student Perceptions” by Ahluwalia, Gupta & Aggarwal (2011) aimed to study the students’ perceptions and attitudes towards the use of blogs in their learning of English. The result revealed that students had an overall positive attitude towards using blogs in English language learning although they faced some difficulties. Blogs are much similar to online journals. The blog writer must keep the blog updated to ensure that the materials are the latest ones and keep the readers engaged.
In my opinion, blogs are able to benefit the language learners. One of the benefits is it improves the student’s writing skills. Through the blog, students can share their thoughts, experiences, opinions and reflections on their learning in an informal setting. By writing, they will indirectly learn to improve their grammatical and writing techniques.
Moreover, one does not need to have a high technical knowledge in handling computers to produce a blog. It only requires basic access to the Internet to write a blog. Therefore, anybody can write a blog as the features are easy to be used. Another benefit is it is interactive. It has comment section where a writers and readers can engage with one another. The writers can also include links to other web pages on their blogs. As an instance, if the writer wants to show a video to the readers, he can easily put a link to the intended video so that the viewers can watch it.
Finally, blog writing is highly motivating for students as they are able to receive comments and feedback from their friends and teacher. Not only that, they can also read their peers’ experiences and opinions on a topic and comment on it. With this interesting feature, students can get to know and learn from each other better.
BY: NUR ADLINA
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