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Weekly UpdatesINTRODUCTION
Computer-mediated communication (CMC) typically involves two dimensions: time (synchronous or asynchronous) and modality (textual or spoken) (Hubbard, 2004; Warschauer, 2001). The text-based CMC involves email, online discussion forums, online chat rooms, and other text on the Internet, whereas the spoken form includes voicemail and email with attached voice recordings (Fotos & Browne, 2004; Hubbard, 2004; Meskill & Ranglova, 2000; Warschauer, 2001). Research has shown that CMC motivates learners to engage in meaningful communication in the target language and leads to effective language learning (Brown, 1994; Hanson-Smith, 2001; Meskill & Ranglova, 2000). It shifts learning from a teacher-centered toward a learner-centered approach, allowing learners to take control of learning content and learning process (Fotos & Browne, 2004).
Studies indicate that a well-designed CMC activity can encourage students to notice and modify output content and structure, enhance motivation, reduce anxiety, foster learner autonomy, and promote cooperative learning (Beauvois, 1992, 1998; Godwin-Jones, 2003; Gonzalez-Bueno, 1998; Kern, 1995; Pellettieri, 2000; Shield & Weininger, 1999). Furthermore, by reducing social-context clues such as gender, race, and status, and nonverbal cues such as facial expressions and body language, CMC provides a safer and more relaxed environment for language learners, especially for the shy or less confident ones (Hanson-Smith, 2001; Sproull & Kiesler, 1991). CMC also enables individuals to express their thoughts at their own pace and in their own space so that, in contrast to traditional classroom settings, CMC learners do not have to compete with their classmates for the instructor's attention (Sproull & Kiesler, 1991).
One of the best-received features of the Web 2.0 era is blogging. Blogs, also called weblogs, have fundamentally changed the way people use and interact on the Internet, by changing users from consumers to contributors of information. Blogs are easily created and easily updateable Web sites that enable authors with no knowledge of HTML to become instant publishers on the Internet. While traditional Web sites that feature hyperlinks and reflect the Web site developers' content-related priorities and usually contain a static, limited scope of content, blogs with Really Simple Syndication (RSS) present readers with diverse ideas, questions, and links and, thereby, help develop collective intelligence (Richardson, 2006; Warlick, 2005).
Blogs have been well received in education owing to their multimedia features, interactivity, and ability to support cooperative and autonomous learning. The strong interconnectedness between bloggers and readers makes blogs a powerful tool for global conversation. Bloggers can read other blogs, link to them, and reference them in their own blogs. The worldwide blog audience enables students to interact with and have their work viewed by others outside the classroom (Campbell, 2003; Godwin-Jones, 2003; Martindale & Wiley, 2005; Richardson, 2006; Warlick, 2005).
Several studies have lent support to the assertion that blogs can effectively facilitate language teaching and learning (Betts & Glogoff, 2005; Bloch, 2007), especially in terms of learners' language complexity, grammatical correctness, and fluency (Hewett, 2000; Pellettieri, 2000). In addition, bloggers tend to have a greater sense of freedom to express their ideas and to make their arguments than do classroom-based participants (Baggetun & Wasson, 2006; Bloch, 2004). Blogs enhance users' exposure to other people of different backgrounds and circumstances (Baggetun & Watson, 2006; Richardson, 2006). The archiving of blog entries facilitates users' reflection on blog content and fosters development of metacognitive strategies for monitoring the progress of learning on the blog (Richardson, 2006; Xie & Sharma, 2004). Through blogging, students take ownership of the virtual space and the work they publish--an outcome that replaces traditional acts of passive information consumption by acts of active information creation (Baggetun & Watson, 2006; Godwin-Jones, 2003; Richardson, 2006; Warlick, 2005).
One common difficulty that foreign-language students encounter is a severe lack of opportunities to put the language knowledge they have acquired into practice in authentic environments (Ho, 2003). For most students, speaking practice in the target language is usually limited to a conversation course. However, owing to large class sizes and limited class time, students tend to have few opportunities to practice speaking. The availability of blogs has created additional opportunities for oral practice.
Research on the effect of blogs on education is still in its infancy, and even less has been explored on the effect of blogs on language learning and teaching. The purpose of this study is to report on the integration of class blogs into L2 speaking courses and to examine (a) the effect of blogs on participants' learning processes and learning strategies, and (b) the participants' perception of the learning experiences afforded by blogs.
This study aims to provide a theoretical and a pedagogical foundation for the premise that extensive practice on blogs can constitute an integral part of instruction, and that blogs enable students to structure their thoughts and to make them publicly available in a way that is rarely possible in other media. The following research questions guided this study:
1. What are the learners' learning processes and learning strategies in voice-blog activities?
2. What emerging themes characterize perceptions of participants' blogging experiences?
METHODOLOGY
The study used two data collection procedures: (a) a survey of student attitudes towards the use of voice blogs, and (b) retrospective interviews with students.
Participants
The participants were 46 college students in Taiwan in two oral communication classes taught by the teacher-researcher. Both classes were relatively large: 24 and 22 students respectively. Of the 46 students, 15 were female and 31 were male. The students' average age was 20.67 years. One student was a freshman, 14 were sophomores, 8 were juniors, 22 were seniors, and 1 was a graduate student. The participants had been studying English as a foreign language for about 9 years, and most of them had never studied abroad in an English-speaking country. They were majoring in a variety of technical disciplines, such as electronic and mechanical engineering, information management science, and electrophysics. These students tended to have relatively little exposure to English in their content-based classes.
The objective of the course was to enhance students' oral proficiency in English by providing them with opportunities to practice speaking and to enhance their public presentation skills. The course included lectures on public speaking, video demonstrations of speech delivery, in-class discussions, and role-playing. Students were expected to complete speaking assignments and to visit a local Toastmasters club (http://www.toastmasters.org). They were also required to submit an observation report. Classes met for two hours weekly. The function of the first hour was to develop public-speaking skills and to focus on book reviews. The function of the second hour was to provide students with hands-on experience regarding such practices in public presentation, feedback dissemination, and organization of meetings. Because the two classes were relatively large, students did not have sufficient opportunities to practice their oral skills in class. Voice blogs, therefore, served as an add-on component that afforded students additional opportunities for oral practice.
Class Blogs
The teacher-researcher chose to set up one blog for each course rather than have the students set up their own blogs because sharing one space increases the likelihood of classmates listening to and interacting with each other (Bloch, 2007). Moreover, the presence of the two class blogs increases the likelihood of the students in the two courses interacting with one another and thus gaining access to a wider audience than they would have been able to in a traditional speaking class. The class blogs were open to the public outside the school so that anyone could listen to the blogs and post comments.
The teacher-researcher developed a voice blog that served as a platform to which students could upload their posts. The blog included interfaces for both students and teachers. For the student interface, the blog was a user-friendly online place to keep oral diaries. In addition to some basic file-uploading tools and a calendar, the blog provided data-management functions, such as ability to sort all posts according to their popularity (measured in terms of number of clicks), date, names of bloggers, number of blog entries, number of responses to others' blog entries, and RSS setting. Bloggers were able to track their own blog history and had easy access to their classmates' blogs.
For the teacher interface, the class blog tracked each student's post history and displayed all the profiles and the data in an online spreadsheet according to various sorting methods based on, for example, student ID number, date of post, and total number of entries (see Figure 1). Each blogger had a separate space within the blog. Each space included the blogger's biographical information, photo, and brief written self-introduction. The space also included a personal calendar that enabled others to check not only how active the blogger was but also the archived titles of past blog entries (see Figure 2). Bloggers could find information in the archives most relevant to their interests by searching by student names, ID numbers, or keywords in the blog titles. When students uploaded a blog entry, they could decide whether to upload one or more images to accompany that particular blog.
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