I graduated high school 18 years ago, and during my classroom observations I have witnessed the marked differences in teaching methods used in classrooms today, as compared to when I was in high school. I do not think my teachers used computers at all. They presented new content via chalkboards and overhead projectors. Today I see teachers using Powerpoint presentations, technology labs and websites to introduce new material, initiate practice, and communicate assignments and other information.
It is certainly a different world, and I do believe that the new technological methods lend themselves well to foreign language instruction in particular. I recently watched a Youtube video about a high school teacher who uses blogging in her French classroom in order to help students practice new concepts and advance their written skills in the target language. Students can be hesitant to express themselves orally while learning a new language. Oral communication skills, however, are key to learning a new language. The teacher's belief is that by encouraging her students to express their ideas via blogs, she can still reinforce the key concepts she wants them to learn, while providing a forum in which they can express their own opinions and even comment on their peers' opinions. This teacher saw that as students practiced using new concepts in written form, they gradually became more comfortable with the concepts and were more likely to express themselves orally during classroom discussions. For example, one blogging assignment was to describe the types of inventions that will make our lives easier in the future. The objective of this exercise was to practice the future tense, which she had recently introduced to the class. After the assignment as due, she picked the conversation up again in the classroom in order to get students to practice the future tense orally.
After watching this video, I was really surprised to read about the findings of Hungerford-Kresser and Wiggins from their classroom blogging study. I think the key difference between the video I watched and this study is the level of the students and the content they were studying. It seems the students who were asked to blog as part of the study were graduate students, and they were blogging about education classes. I think these students were more likely to participate in class discussions and collaborate with one another orally, so the blogging probably was a bit redundant, as many of them said. I still believe that blogging is a perfect tool for the foreign language classroom, as it really encourages expressions of thought and collaboration amongst students while minimizing the fear and apprehension many of them feel when learning a new language. I think this fear and apprehension need to be minimized as much as possible in a foreign language classroom in order for learning to occur. I think one of my biggest takeaways from this article is to return to the blogging comments and conversations in the classroom setting in order to link the blogging back to the current topic of study and use the written expression to prompt the oral expression.
