The Use Of Weblog In English Writing Teaching In Vocational School: An Explorative Study

As we are entering into the 21st century, the Internet has seen further growth, providing more conveniences in English learning and teaching by providing even more rich and diverse learning materials and facilitating human communication. Weblog (or blog) is one of the major online publishing and communication application that have pushed such development.Generally, Weblog can be seen as a kind of Web page consisting of usually very brief and constantly updating posts by the Weblogger. Easy to be built, multimedia and highly interactive, Weblog's educational significance is apparent, and thus has been used and researched by an increasing number of educators, of whom many are English writing teachers. Current research mostly focuses on individual teachers' use of Weblog as a pedagogical narration and retrospective tool. Although there are researches on English teaching for students in group, they are mostly concerned with college or university students. Little research attention has been cast to the application of Weblog in English teaching in secondary vocational schools, particularly in English writing teaching. Practicality and communicativity characterize English teaching in vocational schools. Weblog enables vocational students to learn English by writing, publishing and communicating in English in real life situations. Thus, as a massively used tool popular among young Internet users, Weblog's implication in English teaching shows obvious advantages, especially so in a time when vocational education regains its emphasis in China.The current research, drawing upon theories in cognitive psychology and Bandura's learner self-efficacy theory, examines the application and its effect of Weblogs in vocational English writing. Innovative in using an experimental method for such purpose, the research examines and focuses on vocational English writing teaching, comparing the cognition, effect and intention levels in English writing learning of the experimental class and the control class.The research finds that as apposed to the control class that were not taught with Weblog, the experimental class shows a higher level in their cognition, effect and intension in English writing learning and in self-efficacy. The research suggests that for the "Net Generation" vocational school students, a Weblog-assisted English writing teaching may be a good way to improve their English writing, and thus ultimately vocational English as a whole.