Deirdre Cijffers provides an overview of the current ELT trend of using blogs and forums with higher-level learners.
When thinking about using blogs and forums in the classroom, higher-level learners seem to be the obvious choice of target audience. They certainly make the teacher’s job easier: they can understand instructions more easily and therefore don’t need as much guidance to get to the right places online. Higher-level learners also have greater linguistic resource, so it’s easier to think of interesting topics for them to write about. Perfect, no?
Not quite, but blogs and forums do provide us with a very effective way of challenging more advanced learners. These tools give students that measure of expressive freedom that they don’t necessarily get at lower levels, given that the proportion of controlled practice gets higher the further down the levels you go. When students are at B2 and beyond, they have enough language to get stuck into some chunky subjects and show off what they know, think and feel.
All of this may be true, but we might still ask: do students want to show off, or do they still need some structure within which to express themselves?
A recent survey carried out at two different universities showed that there are some discrepancies between how teachers perceive what happens on blogs and forums and how students experience them and feel about the tasks. What we need to do is stop looking at the blog and forum tools themselves and start thinking more closely about what we do with them.
In my session at IATEFL, we’ll be looking at what those discrepancies are and how we can address them. We will also look at task design and come up with a basic structure for effective tasks that scaffold the process for learners, while giving them as much freedom as they can confidently manage.
See more great posts from Deirdre including more webinars and articles from Cambridge.