Students Learn English Through Blogging
In Burbank, California, almost three dozen students who have different cultures, countries, and languages come together and learn English through a blog. Students from Luther Burbank High School are exchanging posts with hundreds of students all over the world through the blog created by their teacher Larry Ferlazzo who partnered with teachers from six countries.
The students in Burbank are communicating through the internet with the students from six other countries in the planet due to their same desire to learn English as a second language. The worldwide participants of the blog have posted videos of tours in Hungary, voice threads about Romanian architecture, photographs of cable cars in San Francisco, and the like. The students in Burbank then post written and recorded comments on one another’s posts.
During the early stages of the blog project the students in Burbank and the ones abroad got to know each other and about each other’s countries, lives and cultures. Later on the teachers will ask the students to post certain topics or themes, or answer questions about the governments of the countries, their advocacies, and other socially relevant topics.
The Burbank teacher Larry Ferlazzo teaches history and English to non-native students of the said high school and came up with the project in order for his students to benefit a lot from it. The blog project helps the students practice their English writing skills through written posts and their listening and pronunciation skills through the voice threads. Since they are the ones making the posts, they force themselves to work well.
The project exposes the students to other cultures and most of them find it nice that they become friends with people who come from different spheres. The project also opens up the students to the world of technology since many of them have grown up in countries where technology was not a part of their daily lives. The blog also offers an entertaining and attractive method of sharing important skills with each other.
The blog constitutes an authentic audience since the students take part in the production of the blog that is why other students from different parts of the world follow it. The students who participate in the blog become teachers, ambassadors, and representative of various sorts, that is why the blog is interesting and educational at the same time.
Other teachers and in the high school are interested with the project and would want to apply the kind of learning technique even to their native English speaking students.
The blog project started by a teacher with a vision only proves that cooperation and interaction among people from different cultures can bring people together to reach a common goal.
January 27th, 2010 at 7:20 am
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