Why Blog?

I am not the first English teacher to turn to blogging in the classroom. In fact, just the other day I noticed a post on the TESOL blog about this very topic. But since this may be a big change for many of my EAP 91 students, I think I owe them an explanation about why we will be writing and sharing our essays on our own personal (and public) blogs this semester rather than just submitting them through the class's course management website Desire2Learn.

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First of all, I want my students to have an authentic audience for their writing. On the first day of class, when completing the phrase "Writing is or might be..." one of my former students suggested that writing might be a resource for other readers and writers. That is exactly spot on--or at least it should be exactly spot on. Unfortunately, many times student writing is simply turned in to an instructor for a grade and never seen by anyone else, which means that it is often not much of a resource for others. In this class, at the very least, student blog posts will be seen and read by classmates. If a post is particularly compelling, students can even choose to share it with others through social media like Facebook or Twitter, which will definitely provide a real audience.

Another reason I want my students to blog in the EAP classroom is to develop their 21st century digital literacy skills.  Most writing today is written to be shared through a computer screen rather than on a piece of paper. It is the rare computer screen that is simply a screen full of alphabetic text. Instead, I want students to learn to incorporate different modes--like pictures, video, and hyperlinks--in order to communicate with their readers. This type of communication is something they will be asked to do throughout their college and professional careers, so my EAP classroom is a good place to start learning how to do this if students haven't already done so.

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Finally, I think that because of the two previous ideas--the opportunity to write for an audience and to incorporate multimodal design-- blogging will help my students become better writers. Writing for an audience other than a teacher and having the opportunity to craft artful posts are just plain motivating and fun. My hope is that when students know their writing will be read by others, and when they begin to enjoy the process of writing, they will start to care more about the words they write for the screen. This care will hopefully lead to detailed attention to language--yes, the dreaded grammar element of writing--and the words--or vocabulary--that are used to create meaning.

So as we begin this new semester of EAP 91, it is my hope that all of the writers in my classroom--and yes, we are all writers, will enjoy the blogging experience and all it entails. To help us get started, please read the document I created in D2L that explains the basics of blogging and how to set up a new blog in Blogger. Feel free to send me questions or post comments below.