Enhancing ESL Learners' Creative and Critical Thinking through Blogging

Blog is a type of website functioning as a web-based journal that depicts dated posts about a topic arranged from the most recent to the oldest. Furthermore, it is also a web publishing tool enabling one to publish their thoughts or commentaries. It is arguably the first form native to the web (Blood, 2003) that allows the bloggers – persons who do online journals, to keep records of their daily happenings on websites prior any Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML) knowledge or programming experience. This shows blogging as simple as sending email, which almost everyone can publish their views online to global forum. Later when web experts like Justin Hall and Adam Greenfield for the first time used Moblog or MoBlog - a contraction of mobile weblog, it symbolised a further dimension in the development of blog. Moblog has the ability to upload posts through mobile technology. In 2003, the first International Moblogging Conference (1IMC) in Tokyo was organised (Döring & Gundolf, 2006).

Are You Ready to Blog? In Faizah Mohamad (Ed.), Technology in ESL Classrooms

Journal writing has been proven as an eminent and supportive teaching tool across the grades and the curriculum (Hopkins, 2003). It is also a common pedagogical technique in writing courses (Krause, 2005). Nowadays, the writing of e-journals or blogs is becoming progressively more popular as it is one of the easiest ways – almost as easy as sending an email – to publish student writing on the Internet (Stanley, 2005). Given the nature and characteristics of blogs, educators have the opportunities to employ this innovative tool in the English as a Second Language (ESL) classrooms, particularly to enhance journal writing with their students. In addition, if blogs have the potential for application in English Language Teaching (ELT), an investigation should be conducted to study this new educational innovation.

Citation (APA 6th ed.):

Mah, B. Y., & Liaw, S. C. (2011). Are you ready to blog? In Faizah Mohamad (Ed.), Technology in ESL classrooms (pp. 33-54). Selangor, Malaysia: University Publication Centre, Universiti Teknologi MARA