Dana inspires ESL students to blog!
Dana was one of the members in our online session for ESL/EFL online class. She replies to another member, Blinger, on our YahooGroup who had asked that Dana talk some more about her experiences using blogs in her ESL class. Her post, Educational Blogging, is an excellent read.
Quotes from Dana:
Blogs are an excellent way to introduce the concept of writing for an audience. The teacher can spend a lot of time talking about the fact that because their blogs are on the internet, the students need to consider the following things:
1) What topics are appropriate to write about? Anyone can see their blogs; classmates, teachers (their own and others in the program), friends and family from home, random strangers. They should spend some time thinking about what kinds of things they feel comfortable writing about.
2) What topics are going to be interesting? This can get them to think about presentation. They need to think about their prospective audience and how they wish to present themselves to these people out there.
3) What kinds of details should be included? This is a good time to emphasize that writing is different than carrying on a conversation. Students need to think about what kind of background information their audience shares with them, and what information needs to be explained. This is especially important to think about when contrasting ESL and EFL teaching contexts.
Dana continues with this point:
Many ESL students seem to become overly concerned with making sure their grammar is perfect, rather than pursuing overall fluency. I told my students that I would not correct their grammar on their blogs; instead, they can see it as a easily viewed personal record of their language progress from the start of their current course onward. I have tried to make them more aware of how much actually trying to think in English can help the fluency of their writing, whereas stopping too often to make sure the grammar is correct or to look up many new words makes their writing choppy and hard to follow.
She also encourages them to continue with their blogs after class time. She will keep in touch with them.
I just hit a few highlights on her blog. Dana makes some excellent observations plus she really gets the nature of blogging and there are links to her student blogs on her site. You need to read her blog. I plan to follow her weblog journey. She is doing great work with the students!
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