Chapter 3: Enhancing Student Voices in Academic Blog Writing

A growing trend in the use of blogging in teaching and learning activities has been observed in tertiary classrooms considered attractive for its utility in building collaborative practice, enhancing critical thinking skills and developing a student’s voice in the context of shaping various identities. While promising to provide a robust tool for educators, the role of language education in blog writing cannot be negligible when set in amongst competing objectives in blogging tasks. This may be especially relevant for L2 students if language limitations create barriers to fully engaging in blogging activities. The CLIL curriculum approach seems to be ideal to scaffold blogging tasks with linguistic training. This research study involved trialling an intervention using the appraisal system which provides a framework to develop one’s lexical resources to express ideas of attitude or point of view. A total of 17 participants were recruited from cultural and media studies programs and IELTs preparatory classes, with a view to enhancing their voice through writing tasks. Results of the trial study showed that the intervention increased participants use of linguistic resources by significant measures. This study suggests there is ample opportunity to involve more language education into blogging activities to produce compounded results.