A Tentative Study Of Blog's Facilitating Role In English Writing Teaching To English Majors

As a newly developed online technology, Blog has recently been widely used in various fields, in media, education, entertainments, sports, etc. Its popularity has promoted the exploration of blog's educational function and application. This paper aims at exploring the feasibilities of utilizing blog as an instructional tool in teaching English writing and the practical ways of using blog to promote the students' learning interest. For pedagogical interest, it also proposes a tentative design for blog-based English writing teaching.For this purpose, the present paper first looks at the situations in which writing is taught to English majors in China to illustrate that the traditional method is not effective enough. The paper then discusses the different views on the nature of writing, focusing on two main approaches to teaching writing—the product approach and the process approach, with a tentative conclusion that the process approach is the ideal teaching approach in blog-based teaching. Next, the present paper elaborates on the feasibility of blog's application in teaching English writing by building a theoretical foundation on the basis of five language learning theories, namely the constructivist learning theory, the humanistic learning theory, Krashen's language acquisition theory, the collaborative learning theory and the reflective learning theory. With such theoretical explorations, the present writer then produces a tentative design of blog-based teaching procedure to demonstrate that the communicative nature and the simultaneity in the characteristics of blog can provide abundant online materials, offer an efficient way of writing, ensure an effective interaction between the teacher and the students and provide the students opportunities of learning from each other. In the last chapter, the present writer conducts an investigation, consisting of a questionnaire and an interview, to provide some empirical support for the assumption that blog can play a facilitating role in teaching English writing.