THE USE OF BLOGS AS AN EDUCATIONAL TOOL FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF WRITING IN ENGLISH

ABSTRACT

The use of Digital Information and Communication Technologies in the process of English teaching and learning has been one of the alternatives in the development of pedagogical activities that aim to strengthen teachers and learners’ autonomy during this process. The use of DICT in the educational context collaborates not only for the enhancement of linguistic skills – listening, writing, speaking and reading -, but it also contributes for the improvement and the expansion of digital literacy. This article reports a teaching and learning experience in English carried out with first-year students from a Foreign Language Course, aiming at helping learners to develop writing abilities through the construction of an academic blog. The data was analyzed and interpreted based on the methodological conceptions of hermeneutics applied to the qualitative research, with the objective of identifying, analyzing and comprehending the final product, that is, the students’ posts and the entire process behind it. The results suggest that the use of blogs in a real context of English teaching and learning, focusing on first-year students, had good effects once it promoted the development and improvement of writing skills. Through this experience, learners could act as autonomous writers, that is, they had the chance of choosing and discussing themes of their interest, the most appropriate textual genres, make use of multimodality and learn how to make use of digital technologies in the benefit of their learning.

Keywords:
writing; autonomy; blog; technologies; teacher education