using blogs in english class in mainland, China

This project was conducted in writing class over one semester which met in ten 60 minutes lectures sessions once a week, at a high school in Zhuhai, China. The participants are made up of 30 senior 2 students from two different classes aging 16~17 who are interested in this program with their English proficiency level as intermediate.

At the beginning of the program, students were given introduction to the course content and ultimate goal and also to the internet environment that is blogs, in which they would be working through this semester. Because this coursework aimed to inspire students’ collaborative learning in improving writing skills with the aid of a blog and other online multimedia facilities, these 30 participants were divided into 10 groups with 3 in each group – one was responsible for doing writing assignment after group discussion; one for making comments on others’ assignments (at least two every time); and one for revising the writing based on the feedback from other groups or tutor. There would be two teachers as instructors monitoring and assisting students’ operation and learning process in every lecture.

All of the lectures were conducted in multimedia classroom in campus with enough number of computers and high speed internet access afforded. Besides, all of the participants have internet access at home, and particularly most of them can use mobile phone to get to internet, so that they could do the tasks at any convenient time out of class.

Seven texts would be involved in this program with different topics of which the content completely followed the text books in the curriculum of this course, ranging from robots and traveling abroad to geography and culture (see details in Appendix 1). As the best-known hosting services, tBLOG (www. tblog.com) and BLOGGER (www. blogger.co,) would be good choices, which are free and easy-operated with many degrees of comment controls. Since BLOGGER may not be accessible in mainland, China, tBlog was chosen in this program. What’s more important, English was the only language could be used in group discussion and posting.

Teacher was supposed to give comments on each group blog, and have a collective feedback on grammatical mistakes after reviewing each blog, and it would be posted on tutor blog right after every lesson. Students should revise their writing based on others’ comments. At the beginning of each lesson, the outstanding writing would be presented to everyone as a sample, and teacher’s collective feedback as well in order to reinforce their writing in a correct way.