The unrealistic claims for the effects of classroom blogging

The unrealistic claims for the effects of classroom blogging on English as asecond language, student's writing performance

by Ming-Huei Lin, Chin-Ying Lin and Pi-Ying Hsu (2011)

In the aspect of convenience and easiness, blogs are widely used for communicating among people, and many educators tend to believe that the blogs facilitate teaching and learning. I agree this point, so I was thinking to research on the topic recently. Yet, this article, as you can guess from the title, unlike the studies supporting positive results of blogging, revisits if classroom blogging can significantly benefit students learning or not.

     In the research of Taiwan, the experimental comparison on two writing groups of ESL majors comprising 25 students was implemented. To test student performance, the pre/post testing were employed, and the tests were two types of writing task. One is a short argumentative essay about social issue, and the other is a short essay reflecting on events in their lives. The essay was scored and graded by two raters to measure interrater reliability, thereby examining using Cronbach’s alpha. According to the high Cronbach’s alpha (.84) in the test scores

     When examining “the effects on performance of classroom blogging in the ESL writing classroom and compared this approach with a traditional teaching method in writing performance (Lin et al. 2011)”, the results of the paper shows that students taught by a traditional method had similar improvement of writing performance to the students taught using blogs. The researcher explained, however, with the purpose of facilitating student’s learning development; the results revealed blogging format teaching failed to achieve the goal in the EFL writing environment.

       Since my research was strongly related to this research, I read this article very interestingly. My research will deal with “the effect of using blog for young ESL learners’ writing,” and if I can suggest positive previous research data as well as negative results as a literature review, the paper can be more logical and balanced.