The development
of technology has changed the way we live, work and learn. Presently, due to internet capabilities the traditional teaching
process, which involves a classroom with mainly a teacher-centered approach, is
turned out to be dominated by students themselves. Specifically, academic
blogs, as one of the good examples of student-centered approach we practice in
English for Research course, are of substantial benefit for students in developing
their skills in academic proficiency, computer-based knowledge through online
communication.
Blogs are open to everyone to read and comment
on as they are considered
to be public forum. As a result, students double revise their posts for
grammar, syntax and structure because they might receive feedbacks and comments
from teachers and their peers as well (Montgomery, 2015a). Thanks to this
online interaction under one’s post a student tries to do his best to improve
his writing style, accuracy, and fluency in the further posts. However, getting
used to blogging may cause the issue with the shift from academic to more free
style of writing essays where students tend to utilize slangs, abbreviations,
and other types of everyday language. Nevertheless, more than the half of
overall students feels more confident writing now than at the beginning of the
semester (Montgomery, 2015b).
Blogs are also a good way to broaden one’s
scope of knowledge in a particular field that one is interested in. For
instance, I have discovered a lot of interesting topics for myself due to the
online platform where my fellow students from other cohorts discussed salient
issues, shared their opinions on international and Kazakhstani educational
practice, etc. Also, web communication improves students’ skills such as critical, creative thinking and
research. In other
words, searching for a thought-provoking topic and fancy pictures in order to
catch the public interest and then designing them – all make my expertise develop.
Despite the fact that blogging positively influenced on their competencies,
according to the survey, the majority of students still feel difficulties in choosing
a topic for blogging (Montgomery, 2015b). In addition to that, it is essential
to contemplate that for some non-active and shy students blogging is the best
opportunity to speak up interactively and share their perspectives (Warschauer, M. (1997).
Blogs help students to upgrade their
knowledge on ICT. For example, posting, commenting and even creating a new web
page are the things that I learnt due to writing blogs on the internet space.
Now I can easily operate on the web, edit, delete, and share the information
that I found interesting for myself and my group mates. In fact, my prior experience
in teaching languages proves that computer-based tasks are considered to be the
practicable means of teaching writing in language learning classrooms.
Summing up, I would like to point out
that blogging is a new trend of online writing where one can express his
thoughts on a particular matter or gain a bunch of interesting information.
Also, it is an effective way of developing academic proficiency along with IT
competences through online interaction where all students are motivated to
respond on one’s piece of written work.
References
Montgomery, D.P. (2015a, April). Did you
read my new 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.
Montgomery, D. P.
(2015b). [Blogging and Academic Writing]. Unpublished raw data. Retrieved from http://goo.gl/PX8wv7
Warschauer, M. (1997).
Computer‐mediated collaborative
learning: Theory and practice. The
Modern Language Journal, 81(4), 470-481.
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