How to Use a Blog in a Foreign Language Classroom

In all honesty, if my future classes have access to the internet and computers, a blog would be a great opportunity for my students to use in order to practice writing and communicating in their second language with one another.  By giving them a prompt and a rubric, they could each write a blog post in Spanish and then reply to one another as well.  The main issue is making sure that the writing prompts do in fact create worthwhile conversational material and not just an assignment to be done.  If it's a poor prompt, students will just be writing to get the points instead of actually replying to one another on a real communication basis.

Obviously, not all students will involve them 100% in the writing prompt no matter how good it is.  But it is my responsibility to create prompts that highly influence communication as a mean of study as per the Communicative Language Pedagogy in that interaction is the ultimate goal for more meaningful and authentic language use in the classroom. There are many different methods of language teaching and no class follows just one language teaching method; however, in my classrooms, I will put an emphasis on communicative language teaching.  I could go more into why I favor this teaching method, but for now, I'll stick to the topic of this blog post.  As such, blogs are a great tool for communicative language teaching outside of the classroom but in the classroom setting.  Again, this falls back to me making sure the prompts are in fact interactive and communicative.

In addition, another thing I would always love to do is get my classrooms linked with a classroom somewhere in the Spanish-speaking world so that every student has a penpal.  While my students practice their Spanish, this other school would practice their English with my students in an exchange of emails.  However, if I do use a blog in my class, I could take it a step further and these students from another country could visit my students' blogs and see their work and possibly even comment on them, furthering the conversation and interactive pieces there.  I think this could be another great use of a blog, linking it with other coursework inside the class.  It possibly could get conversations really flowing, or at least, that'd be something great to see!