An exploratory study of employing blogs as a platform for English learning beyond the classroom

With their wide application in the Web 2.0 era, blogs have drawn increasing attention of educators and teachers in educational circle. More and more teachers use them as a pedagogic tool in instruction. This paper describes how a class blog can be integrated into the study of Comprehensive English Course for English majors in China in an attempt to provide an out-of-class space for language practice and for sharing course-related ideas and information. It summarizes the strengths and setbacks of using blogs with out-of-class English learning on the basis of the observation and analysis of the students´ blog contributions and their responses to two surveys. This study shows that blogs play a significant role in students´ language learning in a variety of ways: promoting learners´ sense of authorship, fostering collaboration among learners, producing more interaction among learners and between learners and teachers, producing more comprehensive output, enhancing students´ sense of class community. However, setbacks preventing learners from making full use of Blog as a learning tool are also found, such as: online distraction, network speed, blogging topic, online reading habit, etc. To solve these problems, some suggestions are given to tackle them. In all, to make full use of this virtual space for English learning, more efforts and time are needed to be devoted to the blog activities both on the part of learners, and on the part of teachers and school administration.