Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
9th International METU Postgraduate Conference on Linguistics and Language Teaching, Ankara, Türkiye, 14 - 15 Aralık 2013, cilt.1, ss.1-15
Using blogs for various purposes and in various aspects of language teaching and learning have attracted a great deal of attention recently. As blogs are mostly favored by teachers and their benefits for the learners are supported by plenty of research, many institutions have started to integrate blogs in their process of language teaching. The University of Turkish Aeronautical Association has been one of the institutions benefiting from the blogs every semester. However, although blogs have been a part of the English preparatory program in this university, the opinions of the teachers and students have not been investigated and the effect of using blogs has not been revealed. In addition, there has been a need to investigate the challenges of blogs to be able to use them more effectively. The researcher of this study has been inspired from these needs and conducted a study to reveal the benefits of blogs in reading classes, the challenges that teachers and students may face while using blogs in these classes and possible solutions for overcoming these challenges. To investigate these various aspects of using blogs in reading classes, a questionnaire developed by the researcher have been administered to 100 students. The questionnaire includes sections to investigate useful sides of the blogs, challenging parts of the blogs, general perceptions of the blogs and demographic information about the students who have used blogs in their reading classes. The questionnaire has provided extensive information on the aspects that students find useful about blogs especially blogs’ contribution to students’ reading skills and revealed problems that students encounter while using blogs. In addition to the questionnaire, 5 teachers have been interviewed to investigate the topic from teachers’ perspective as well. Their opinions are asked about advantages of using blogs and challenges that they face while using blogs in reading classes. Results show that blogs contribute to various skills of students especially their reflective skills and it is enlightening to see through the open ended questions of the questionnaire 2 that students find blogs particularly useful as they contribute to their vocabulary knowledge and help them to understand the reading texts better as they think about the texts more to write a blog entry. In addition, the difficulties that students have encountered in this process are shown in detail via this research. For this reason, the study has significant results revealing extensive information about the contribution of blogs to reading classes.