In my experience tutoring English language learners, the hardest part of teaching is getting the students to speak in the first place. Often my students know the answer, but they are afraid that it is not exactly right, so they say they do not know. Since they are too self-conscious about their English to speak when they are not certain of their correctness, they miss valuable opportunities to acquire English by practicing it in casual, real contexts.
Blogs written by the students of ESL classrooms might provide a solution. With learner blogs, such as Rosa Ochoa's students' blogs, students could be given the assignment to just write, producing a blog on a particular topic or just a journal of their lives. The blogs could be graded on the basis of wordcount, on a curve, so that the students who produced the most total words, both in their own blogs and in comments on other students' blogs, received the highest grades, regardless of the correctness of their English.
In a compilation of many other articles on the issue of helping English learners feel comfortable producing English, Nguyen Minh Hue mentions several means of encouraging students to speak and write, many of which this sort of assignment would involve.
1. Give Students Extra Time to Complete Tasks: Since the assignment is over a semester and at home, students have as much time to complete the task as they are willing to dedicate. There is no time pressure.
2. Bring Tasks Within Students' Experience: Students can make use of the background knowledge they have, allowing the students to choose topics for which they have the necessary grammar and vocabulary and also to increase their confidence by writing about things about which they are knowledgeable. Especially for adults, this could help with the embarrassment caused by not being competent in English.
3.Attend to Students' Individual Needs and Ability: With this project, students can work at their own pace and at their own level. They can choose which grammar and words to use or not use.
4. Change Students' Negative Attitudes Towards Mistakes: A free writing blog would help promote an environment where mistakes are accepted as a part of learning, because the focus is on amount of language, not number of mistakes.
5. Introduce Opportunities for Students to Speak English Outside of Class: A blogging project like this would make English use into a social activity. Students could share pictures and stories about their lives, as Rosa Ochoa's student Ivy does on her blog. Grading by word count encourages students to use their blogs as much as possible, and if comments on other students' blogs were counted in the grade, it would create a fun, social, environment for English practice that might even persist past the time the students left the classroom.
Reading through these students' blogs, it is clear to see that they are engaged in sharing their lives, expressing themselves, and experimenting with language. In one of her posts, Ivy becomes poetic speaking about how wintertime reminds her of when she and her husband first met. The English isn't perfect, but the students are practicing and most importantly of all, enthusiastic about using English authentically, despite the mistakes they may make.
Image by Flickr user Freddie Peña.
