Be Creative and Collaborative: Strategies and Implications of Blogging in EFL Classes

Abstract

The 21st century has seen the emergence of blogs as an authentic writing practice that provides students with a sense of immediacy by allowing them to document their lives as stories or to engage their classmates with real or imaginary tales. In this study, Saudi EFL students were asked to post their writing in a blog and collaborate with their peers to edit that writing. This research used Storybird.com to offer students an opportunity to blog on curriculum topics. By sharing their entries with each other, students developed collaboration skills, individual voices, and responsibility for their writing. This research concludes by discussing the project’s implications (the peer collaboration involved gave students ownership of their writing and a better understanding of standards), challenges (time and privacy constraints), recommendations specifically for the Saudi context, and general recommendations for implementing blogging in the curriculum.