My reflection on Blogging

The digital revolution of the last few decades has brought progressive changes to the world making its society dynamic, its economy knowledge-and-technology-driven, and its education globalized. Accordingly, adapting new computer-based approaches of teaching and learning had a significant impact on the development of education in general. Blogging, as a new trend in academic writing, is an effective way of learning a second language because it helps students express their voice and at the same time improve their academic and colloquial writing and speech.

            Blogging for second language learners assist to link “the interactivity of speech with the permanence of writing” (Warschauer, 2010, p. 1). It means that posting blogs reflects a strong interconnection between speech and writing. Also, blogging develops student’s critical thinking, responsibility for their words and skills to balance the voice in academic and colloquial writing. Thus, blogging has let a start to a boom of free writers, free voice and a circulation of information all over the world (Warschauer, 2010). Moreover, writing classroom blogs provokes the learner-centered education where students might express their voice and influence the learning system at all. However, there is a risk that the freedom to write in different topics might cause sensitiveness among readers.

Concerning academic and colloquial writing, some research revealed that a student who scored high in an academic vocabulary test had a low indicator in middle-range vocabulary one (Montgomery, 2015). It shows that a student who pays more attention to learning the language through academic readings might have a shortage of a colloquial vocabulary. And, thus, blogging could prevent this gap by letting students express the ideas in natural and understandable way (Montgomery, 2015).

As for my personal experience, I would say that blogging helped me feel free to talk to the audience and share my ideas and thoughts with them. So, blogging had a positive impact on my academic and independent writing. For example, attempts to write a post by formulating the sentences and ideas in easy-understandable way enhanced the fluency of my speech. Before when we used to write academic essays with definite rules, it restricted my horizons of thinking because of the rubric. But when I started blogging it opened the door for me to the beauty and richness of the English language. However, there was one limitation for me – the time. If I had more time on thinking about the topics of the blogs and writing them then I would put myself more in the blogs

As a blogger, I would rate my experience as satisfactory and successful. I would highly recommend it to other students who want to improve academic writing and speech. . In my opinion, a blogger is a writer. In writing you show your soul and thoughts, ask distressing questions, and share your feeling with a reader. And only the message from heart finds a way to heart.

References

Montgomery, P. (2015, April). Did you read my post?: Improving autonomy, English, and

engagement through class blogs. Paper presented at The International Conference for Building Cultural Bridges, Suleyman Demirel University. Kaskelen, Kazakhstan: ICBCB.

Warschauer, M. (2010). Invited commentary: New tools for teaching writing. Language

Learning & Technology, 14(1), 3-8