A GENERATION 1.5 STUDENTS ENTERS
THE BLOGOSPHERE
By John Bloch
This article deals about the use of blogs, the focus of this paper will be on the blogging experience of one student, a Somali immigrant, and how they impact ESL/EFL teachers who see blogging as a simple and low cost way of giving students access to publishing and distributing their writing on the Internet, as a method of providing them with the experience of writing in a digital format, so they can discuss different issues related to their classrooms or work life.
Blogs have what is called the open architecture, and that means that everyone can see what you write on your own or somebody’s blog.
Blogs also are centered on the author; in fact, many people have become famous because of that.
Blogs have become famous because of:
They have contributed to the discussion of issues in the public sphere throughout the world. Therefore, for ESL/EFL teachers, blogging would seem a potentially useful tool for creating a space to discuss issues that may not be the focus of the traditional classroom.
The term has been used to differentiate adult immigrants and their children born in the United States and those who immigrated but spent at least some time in the US school system and therefore may have become more acculturated to American life. These students have some facilities on writing, speaking, and readings skills in their own language and also in English, although this terms is also used to differentiate them from international students.
However, Generation 1.5 and international students can be differentiated based on the degree of bilingualism as well as a variety of other factors, including cultural, economic, linguistic, and family backgrounds that have been shown to differentiate the educational experiences of these students.
Research has indicated that Generation 1.5 students may have different backgrounds from international students who come from areas where literacy is widespread.
Generation 1.5 students whose literacy development had been interrupted (difference in L1 literacy can affect learning to write in a second Language) do not always have experience working with texts as do students who have been writing in either their first or second language throughout their lives. The problem is not that they have lower levels of writing than other L2 students, but they have less, or perhaps no, experience with academic writing. Somali students have only a limited level of literacy in their home language.
Blogging, Academic Writing, and Teaching about Plagiarism
By engaging students in a discussion of plagiarism, they would be better able to understand how plagiarism is viewed in the university, its relationship to academic writing, and strategies for avoiding its consequences. In this way, the students could develop a critical perspective on some of the controversies regarding plagiarism.
Graff (1989) has argued, the integration of the nature of the content and the form of literacy is a
crucial element of what he calls a critical literacy. He argues that critical literacy should be seen as a dynamic process that is linked to a changing view of both self and society. Therefore, he goes on to argue that it must play a central role in learning to read and write.
We set up the blog so that anyone could read the blog but only the students in the class could post to it.
There have been two primary types of blogs: Issues-oriented blogs that discuss social and political issues, and identity blogs that discuss personal issues. Based on these uses, four specific goals for the use of the class blog were created:
1) To write using a variety of genres both personal and academic
2) To discuss and negotiate a variety of issues related to plagiarism
3) To provide a space outside the classroom for students to collaborate and argue.
4) To create texts that could both express students' own viewpoints and be used by other students to critique or support their views.
Blogging, as with other forms of online discourse, can also foster the development of social communities, if only for a short period. This sense of community was important because of the disparate backgrounds of the students, who were primarily from Korea and Taiwan, except for the three East Africans and one Arab student. We found, at least among the immigrant students, that some felt there was a tension between these groups. As one of the East African students explained to her teacher, there were really "two classes".
Using Blogs to Foster Critical Literacy in an Academic Writing Class
Another goal for the use of blogging was to provide a space for students to think critically about
plagiarism and its policies. Much has been written about how online discourse can foster an alternative writing space in which writers feel a greater sense of freedom to express their ideas and to argue than they might feel in the classroom, which can in turn help students develop a critical perspective in their writing.
The approach to critical discourse relies heavily on the students’ ability to reflect on and critique the texts they were reading in class. We often found, however, that when using source texts, the students either stuck very close to the text, sometimes to the extent of what might be called patch writing. One of the goals for using blogs was to help students learn to "weave" their own ideas with the source texts.
Entering the Public Sphere as part of the Writing Process
The approach that was used in the course was based on research on how knowledge is created in a social context and how the writing process reflects this knowledge creation process. Blogs are forms of software that can help create social communities where both readers and writers can interact. Blogs can reflect the writer’s engagement with herself and with a community.
As Latour (1988) has pointed out, academic writers often critique the previous literature in order to establish a basis for their own research and in order to support their claims. In the past, we had found that students had a great deal of trouble taking such critical positions. However, some previous research has shown that students often expressed critical ideas in more depth in their blogs, as well as in other forms of online discourse, than they did in their classroom assignments.
The fact that the blog entries were posted online and the students could read them at their leisure may have been a major factor in creating a critical dialogue that would not necessarily have been accomplished in the classroom. This kind of self-reflection could be helpful in the transfer between the blog and the classroom assignment.
The blogs also provided the teachers with insight into the social context to support this interactivity, and they could also indicate aspects of the blogs that the student could use in the academic paper.
Creating Texts with Blogs
Blogging was used to create a large pool of texts that the students could discuss in their papers.
In order to give texts this kind of value, it was necessary for the students to gain some expertise in what they were writing about. By reading a number of articles on plagiarism and then writing and publishing their own texts on the topic, the students were developing an expertise about plagiarism that went far beyond the five-minute orientation they had received from the university.
Having this expertise would also free them from having to write only on topics they knew about.
It was also hoped that thinking about the textuality of blogging would help them achieve another level of metacognition about how the blogging and classroom assignments were related. One way to facilitate the transfer between the blog and the paper was to encourage students to recognize that what they had written in their blogs could also be used in their classroom assignments.
Students often seem to feel that these writing environments are not related to each other, even though they were using similar rhetorical strategies in both. Therefore, to facilitate this process of transfer, we asked them to simply cut and paste ideas from the blog into the paper. However, we felt that this act of cutting and pasting and then synthesizing what they had written was potentially useful for helping them develop their ideas in classroom assignments.
Teacher could also help their students focusing on the development of their conclusions, which they do in their papers, where students were expected to express their own opinions.
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As a conclusion, this paper has attempted to explore how blogging can be used in a L2 composition classroom. I personally believed that Blogs are very helpful, in term of students’ writing improvement. It seems that this is more interactive than writing on a piece of paper, and teachers can notice the student development, besides as teachers we can considered blogging as an important form of literacy, it is also important to explore blogging as a tool in the acquisition of more academic forms of writing.
Students tend to feel freedom while they practice their writing on Blogs. However, it is easy to copy and paste with computers, so we always must check and prevent our students from it, they have to use original ideas, with their own words, so that they will have a very critical, synthetic ideas in classroom assignments.
